


Nothing Has to Be True

by bunnyfication



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: M/M, Minor Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 02:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17173712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnyfication/pseuds/bunnyfication
Summary: After the battle at Houtou castle, Sanzo has some things to figure out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kirathaune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirathaune/gifts).



> Written for the 2018 Minekura fanwork exchange and the talented Kirathaune, whose prompt was: “after the final battle; unexpected attraction, neither one has a clue. (393)” Hope you enjoy this sadly unbetaed thing. Title borrowed from a First Aid Kit song that always gives me Saiyuki feels. :3
> 
> Obviously, this isn’t my first 393 post-Houtou battle fic, even recently. But that just meant I could do another take! So, what is Sanzo going to lose this time *spins wheel*

**Now:**

He walks, not looking back. The ground seems to radiate cold through the worn soles of his sandals as if the winter has sunk deep into it. It is early enough in the spring that the willow branches that bend over the path only have tiny green buds on them, creating a hazy mist of light green in the distance against the still mostly greyish brown background of the forest.

He doesn’t look up from the stamped, bare earth of the path. He almost thinks he can hear footsteps following him, a sharp, fast staccato he hasn’t heard in years, and he grits his teeth against the urge to look behind him.

There will be nothing there. There is nothing there. There is only the road ahead.

Intentionally, he forces the tension out of his shoulders, forces his thought to still. Focuses on the act of walking, the way his feet move forward one step at a time. The forest around him, still subdued but starting to brim with life; birds calling to each other and searching for nesting material, small animals in the underbrush, insects crawling on the leaves…

He sees a movement in the corner of his eye, and without thought , he is pointing a gun at the possible threat. It’s a deer, frozen in place, the dappled side falling and rising. Its eyes are like black mirrors, staring right at him. It thinks if it doesn’t move, he won’t see it. Foolish animal, he thinks. As he lowers the gun, the deer starts, turning to run into the forest, white tail surrounded by black flashing as it jumps over small bushes and hillocks. A bird trills louder, discordantly, and then the forest goes expectantly quiet.

As if it knew there is a predator here, he thinks, mouth bending into an unpleasant smile. It wouldn’t be wrong, would it?

*

**Then:**

He is alone, at the end of the journey, as alone as when he started.

“Too late,” Ukoku says, his voice wet and bubbling. He’s grinning, mouth a red slash in a white face. “Now we see what… happens.”

He laughs, and it’s a grotesque sound. He’s dying, meaningless, and when Sanzo lets go his body falls to the floor like a broken doll.

Just like Gojyo’s had before, his eyes wide and surprised as he slid down the wall, leaving a wide red smear on the rough stone. Hakkai’s scream still seems to echo in his ears, the raw pain in his voice.

Sanzo had known right then it was over for both of them.

Gojyo had to be the first to go, Sanzo thinks. His teeth grind together as he takes a step closer to where the five sutras are floating in the air, doing whatever task Ukoku has set them to. Or perhaps not, he doubts the bastard knows what he has set in motion himself or cared when he still could.

He glances back, one foot on the pedestal above which the sutras hover, shifting restlessly with a whisper of cloth.  The unearthly, pulsing glow they emit reflects glassily off of Ukoku’s staring, sightless gaze and the pool of blood he’s lying in.

Whatever happens now, he won’t be there to see it, and Sanzo hopes that galled him in his last seconds.

There’s no other movement in the large room. It smells of death: blood, shit and the reek of decay and pungent chemicals from Gyumao’s enormous corpse.

Sanzo closes his eyes and wonders what the point of any of this is.

The glow from the sutras burns red through his eyelids, and this close he isn’t sure the whispering sound is just cloth against cloth, or whether it’s distant voices in a language he almost but not quite understands. There is a crawling, cold sensation up his spine, telling him to run.

What if he did, he thinks, with exhaustion deeper than bone. Who is there left to judge him that matters worth a damn.

There’s a soft sound behind him, and his eyes open.

“Restoration,” The boy standing behind Sanzo says, his voice flat and emotionless, his eyes trained on the writhing sutras. The shifting light reflects oddly on his too smooth, too still face. “It won’t be any use, and even if it works, I’ll just kill him again,” he adds conversationally.

His white clothes are spattered in red, a wide splash of it like a sash over his chest.

One sleeve is in tatters, the skin underneath it scored but not bleeding, from when the Seiten Taisei had raked his claws across it. Sanzo’s gun is pointed at the boy, the god, with no memory of pulling it out.

Frosty violet eyes meet his, and the boy’s mouth bends into a smile.

“I remember now,” he says. “He said my name…”

His head tilts, considering, and then:

“You can’t kill me with that,” he says with something like regret. “But perhaps they can.”

He moves forward, and Sanzo presses down on the trigger, even knowing the boy is likely telling the truth. All he can see, in the blinding flash of the gun, is how Goku had looked as he fell, not surprised like Gojyo had been, not eerily calm like Hakkai, just determined to the last…

And then there is a brighter flash, a brush of heat so sudden and violent it is almost gentle, and then, nothing.

*

**Now:**

He’s scrubbing the floor and telling himself this was what he wanted, why he came to this particular monastery where he wouldn’t be recognized. The abbot knows, of course. Sanzo had heard he was a strict taskmaster with little respect for authority other than his own. Strict but scrupulously fair, supposedly.

He had thought, if it was true, maybe it could be something he could live with. Better than to be treated as something he wasn’t, anymore.

The worst of it is, abbot Jyoan is pretty much exactly as he was said to be. Sharp, caustic and dry as bone, but fair. And not in the least impressed by him, which was as refreshing as it was infuriating.

So far, he’s mostly kept his distance, complying to Sanzo’s wish to be treated as any monk who had newly arrived at the monastery.

Until now.

“Sir? Something I can help you with?” Sanzo asks peevishly, glancing up towards the thin figure standing in his way. As usual, every fold of his robes is as meticulously placed as if carved by a sculptor, and his back is straight despite the man’s obvious age. His clear eyes are regarding Sanzo with a considering expression down his nose. It makes his hackles rise.

“What?” he grinds out.

Abbot Jyoan’s lips turn up in a faintly sardonic smile.

“I wished to speak to you, Jīn Chánzǐ,” he says, the faintest ironic stress on the new name the Three Aspects had chosen to assign to Sanzo, now that he strictly speaking wasn’t a Sanzo anymore. Even now, he wasn’t truly used to it, just as he wasn’t to the absence of the sutra.

There are many things he was still having trouble adjusting to, in his new life. But then, it had only been a year since he arrived.

They walk in silence over the walled courtyard, the guard monk at the gate straightening up as he sees the abbot passing by. 

Outside, a straight path leads to the abbot’s own quarters, surrounded by an orderly garden. The monastery is built on the lower slopes of a mountain and not particularly large. In some ways, it reminds Sanzo faintly of the one where he’d spent his childhood, if only in contrast to the larger one at Chang-an.

Now, in early spring, the nature has just started to wake from under the newly melted snow. The ground outside the paved path is covered in last year’s vegetation, but the green spears of shoots are starting to push through the dead, brittle leaves.

“You’ve been here some time now, Jīn,” the abbot says once they’ve traversed the distance from the common courtyard. The abbot’s quarters are empty at this time of day, the monks who live there employed elsewhere in the small complex. Sanzo doesn’t miss that their conversation is as private as it can be, here.

“You have some complaint, abbot Jyoan?” he asks, trying his best to keep his voice neutral.

The abbot squints at him from the corner of his eye, before turning to seemingly behold the early flowering plum tree in a sunny corner of the yard. Just that brief glance is sharp enough to make Sanzo feel like a much younger and less experienced man, called to answer for some personal failing.

He feels his jaw tensing in irritation. Who is this abbot to judge him? 

Abbot Jyoan speaks, interrupting his thought.

“I’ve heard of your past exploits, Genjo.” He says, voice quiet and precise. “Not the deeds of a coward, certainly.”

The words may have been flattering, but the abbot sounds, if anything, disappointed.

“That’s not my name anymore,” Sanzo replies.

“As you know, I have somewhat exacting standards, more exacting than some would,” The abbot says, slowly.

Sanzo frowns and says nothing.

“There are people who come to a monastery to escape their failings in life,” abbot Jyoan adds, and sniffs to show what he thinks of it. “Some of them, in time, learn to let go of that. Others do not.”

The abbot’s face is unreadable as he turns towards Sanzo properly.

“I will speak plainly,” he says, as if he hasn’t already. “You, Jīn, are ill-suited for this path of exaggerated humility you’ve chosen. I am not in the business of dealing out punishments. I suggest you seriously consider what you are achieving here, exactly.”

The words are like a meticulously sharpened blade, cutting so easily it’s only felt a moment after the cut.

Sanzo, perhaps fortunately, is so angry for a moment he goes speechless. He imagines wringing the abbot’s thin, supercilious neck, in graphic detail, even as the man gives him a cool smile, apparently unconcerned.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I think you have valuable skills. And there are many people in the world who could stand to learn humility. However,” the abbot says, and his eyes on Sanzo are as keen and sharp as his words were. “There is false pride, and there is knowing one’s own value for exactly what it is. And frankly, I’d consider false humility just as bad as false pride. It is certainly as irritating to witness.”

They stand in silence only broken by the sounds of birds calling to one another in the forest just outside the monastery, the slight rustling of the leaves as a wind rises-

“That was all I have to say, for now,” abbot Jyoan says, distantly, and doesn’t react to the fury Sanzo is fairly sure is showing plainly in his expression, merely smiling in a dry fashion. “I have other business to take care off.”

He stands there as the abbot leaves, still as a statue, feeling like dry wood ready to splinter at the force of his own anger. For a year, he has been trying to be a… not a good monk, he’d had no illusion he’d ever be that. But he’d thought, somewhere in the harsh lines of discipline there would be a way forward. A calm point in the storm.

A place to be still.

He breathes, one breath after another. The flat stone of the path underneath his sandals is solid, the air has a bite of cold in it.

He wonders, quite suddenly, what the others have been doing since he last saw them.

He hadn’t looked back as he walked away, but he can suddenly see that last image of them as clearly as if he’d just turned away from them.

Gojyo had been turned away, pointedly as if he couldn’t bear to even look at Sanzo, all his angry words long since exhausted.

Hakkai, sitting at the wheel and his brow furrowed in concern, and somewhere almost but not quite hidden, a quiet judgement.

And lastly, Goku, who he had made himself look at when he’d wanted to avoid him. His face, Sanzo thinks, had been curiously blank. But his hands had been clutching the back of the jeep. Like he was keeping himself in place with a force of will.

Part of him had been surprised he hadn’t heard familiar running footsteps behind him. Pleasantly so, he’d told himself firmly, even as the not-there echo of those steps had followed him, all the way to the gates of the monastery. Sometimes, he still thought he could hear them, and then started at the absence.

Sanzo closes his eyes, drawing in a deep breath of the clear, cool mountain air.

Ah, right. He was being a fool. What was it Jikaku had said, all those years ago? Something about smoke and lives, and the importance of exhaling? Gods, but he needed a cigarette.

He felt like he’d gone a full circle, and the old man was laughing at him again.

*

**Then:**

What happened, they’d all asked afterwards. Hakkai had, with his eyes full of wonder and seemingly unable to stop glancing at Gojyo, as if he had to make sure he hadn’t disappeared since the last few seconds.

So had Sharak, miraculously alive if worse for the wear after Ukoku’s attack that had led to the loss of her sutra. Sanzo hadn’t expected to see her alive, truly, after seeing it there. It was a pleasant surprise, and also explained why the bastard had been so slow in the last fight, he’d thought vindictively

He’d told her the truth, as he’d told Hakkai, and everyone else he’d felt deserved an explanation.

He didn’t remember. Not most of it, not enough to make true sense of what he did remember. Most of it felt like a dream, his brain making up images of something it couldn’t fully comprehend.

The boy god, Nataku, or whatever Goku said his name was, had reached for the glowing tangle of the Tenchi Kaiken Kyoumon, and right as his fingertips touched them, or perhaps just before, something happened.

At the time, if Sanzo had had time to think of anything, he would have presumed that was it, the end of the world. He remembered there being a time in between that and what came after, but only barely, like an unfinished sketch of a memory. He couldn’t tell how long it had been either. The time had seemed both like nothing at all and infinite, at once.

He had a distinct suspicion he had known things then that he could no longer recall. Things that simply didn’t fit in his mind as it was, before and after that point. Just trying to think of it gave him a headache.

What he’d kept was an awareness that a decision had been reached. By him, or perhaps by someone else. Perhaps many people, in unison.

He had dreamed, once, afterwards, of standing in a large circle, so large it faded out into the distance. He couldn’t see the other people clearly, like there was dust in his eyes, but there was a hand in both of his. He turned to see Koumyou at his other side, smiling delightedly. Sanzo had stared at him, about to ask what on earth they were doing. He was interrupted by a deep, disgruntled sigh from the person on his other side, a complaining voice saying: “I don’t see why I have to be here for this.”

He’d woken with the sound of Koumyou’s laughter still in his ears, clearer than he’d thought he could still remember.

He knew that hadn’t happened. But it had the right shape.

Whatever it was that really occurred, he woke up, afterwards, head feeling both heavy and immeasurably light all at once, to the grave face of the boy god above him.

“It is done,” he said, his eyes immeasurably old in his childlike face, and then smiled, a smile that was sad but reached all the way to his eyes, like the first, tentatively warm day of spring.

“What happened?” Sanzo had asked, right before he realised that the god was wearing the sutras, all of them, draped over his narrow shoulders in five layers. They were inert and quiet now. Quieter than they’d ever been, as if tired, if that was even possible.

He reached for them, instinctively, and Nataku danced back, shaking his head.

“We agreed,” he said, still smiling sadly, before getting a distant expression, as if he was listening to something. “I will carry this weight, for now. Take them away from this world, so this can’t happen again.”

Sanzo wanted to say he hadn’t agreed to anything, but the words died unsaid in his mouth, feeling like an untruth. Had he?

“Look after him,” Nataku said, “Don’t let him be alone.”

And then he was gone as if he’d never been there.

“Sanzo!” a voice called to him, a voice he’d known he’d never hear again just minutes ago, and he turned, squinting towards the broken doorway, stumbling away from the room filled with death and towards the light.

*

**Now:**

He sleeps lightly, from a lifetime of never knowing when he’ll be attacked. It has the added benefit that he usually knows when he is dreaming, except when he’s tired or injured enough to be sunk in deep.

Of course, simply knowing something isn’t real doesn’t make it hurt less.

But this is not one of those dreams, truly.

It’s Goku, behind bars as when they first met. Except he’s not gazing up at him with wide, luminous eyes, crowding as close to the pillars of stone as his chains will allow. Rather, he’s curled up at the outer edge of the light falling into the cave, still in the shadows.

Sanzo takes a step forward, intending to call out. Goku has no business being so still, it’s like seeing a blue sky without the sun, unnatural. But it’s like his voice is stuck in his throat, and Goku doesn’t move. He’s so deep in the shadows Sanzo can barely see him, can’t tell if he’s even breathing.

He tries to take another step, but he’s held back. Looking down, he sees shackles on his wrists, with heavy chains leading into the shadows behind him. He realizes, suddenly, how cool the air is around him, the air damp and stuffy. And there is stone around him, the heavy weight of a mountain.

Ah, he thinks. That’s very funny.

He wakes, with a bitter laugh lodged in his throat still, in a small room with air nearly as damp and cold as the cave in the dream.

And he realizes he will leave. The same day. There is no reason to linger, now that he has decided. Nothing to pack, either. He has his gun, that’s all he needs.

There’s an odd feeling brought by the decision, a lightness he hasn’t felt in a while, if ever. He doesn’t know where to go, but that, at least, isn’t new. And there is no urgency to it, not this time.

Most people would think it might be difficult, even impossible, to find three people in all of China. But it’s those three, so he doesn’t think it will be difficult at all. They’ll stick out like sore thumbs, where ever they have gone.

As he stumbles up from his bedroll, dizzy from lying down all night and old injuries aching with the damp, he thinks more realistically of the way ahead and groans. If he has to walk all the way to Chang-an, or perhaps even further off, with no certainty he’ll even find what he’s looking for there...

Well. He only has himself to blame, doesn’t he, Sanzo thinks and steels himself to the possibility.

Besides that, he should tell the abbot, he thinks, and then dismisses the thought just as fast. Fuck that, no way is he subjecting himself to that.

He’ll just sneak into the kitchen and find something that is transportable and will keep him until the closest inhabited place. It’s early enough that few people will be about, even at the monastery that never quite sleeps.

The sun hasn’t quite risen yet, everything a murky grey before dawn. He has to step outside to get to the kitchen building, set to the side in case of fire. The long grass he walks through is damp, making his sandaled feet slosh wetly and his robes stick to his ankles.

Sanzo sighs, squinting towards the squat, undecorated building. It has few windows, tightly shuttered against vermin and the elements.

He opens the door, congratulating himself that it isn’t locked. Maybe there’ll be some novice there, starting on breakfast for the monks that will be getting up soon. He can probably convince them to get him something, otherwise he’ll just figure it out later.

Rather than a young monk or a novice, he finds it’s an old one, bent down to work on a fire in the large oven at the back of the room. The firelight glows orange on a round, wrinkled face, squinting serenely into the flames until he turns, surprised to see Sanzo.

The monk blinks at him, and Sanzo spends a moment trying to place him, before recognizing him as the head cook.

“Sorry to bother you,” he says, trying his best for polite despite the early hour.  

The cook is peering at him with a puzzled expression as if he’s trying to recall something.

“Ah, it’s you!” he says after a moment, his face clearing.

“Jīn, isn’t it?” the old monk says cheerfully. “The abbot spoke to you yesterday, didn’t he?”

At whatever he sees on Sanzo’s face, his jovial expression crumples into dismay.

“Oh no,” he says. “Whatever did he say?”

“What?” Sanzo asks, wondering if the man is senile.

“The abbot,” the monk says, and continues in a low, confidential voice: “now, he means well, but he doesn’t have the patience for diplomacy…” he shakes his head sadly. “He worries, you know,” he tells to Sanzo who isn’t sure what to make of any of this.

“I know, he shows it in odd ways, but that’s just how he is. Please don’t take it badly.”

For one, he had no idea the abbot was on close terms with anyone, let alone a cook, and the rest of it…

The old monk smiles at him, momentarily seeming many years younger. Then he seems to start.

“Oh, that reminds me, the letters for you!”

“Letters?” Sanzo repeats, wondering what that has to do with anything.

The old monk, whose name is still escaping him, laughs and waves a hand.

“I keep forgetting them, and then see them there on the table… I don’t know why Jyoan even gave them to me rather than the secretary. But now you’re here! Now, where did I put them...”

He searches for something, opening cupboards and even checking under baskets and pots. Sanzo becomes increasingly convinced the man must be confused, or at the very least confusing him with someone else. The abbot probably upbraids ten monks a day, when he’s feeling cheerful.

“Look, I was just—” he begins to say, intending to get what he came for and go, but just then the old monk reaches into his robes, rummaging around with a focused expression before his face clears in triumph.

“Ha! I had it with me, I forgot that!” he says, face shining as he brandishes a small stack of letters.

Letters? They cannot be for Sanzo, he specifically told them not to send any… unless. They wouldn’t have thought to go around that by sending them to the abbot of the monastery, would they?

He looks down at the stack of slightly crumpled envelopes the old monk is now holding out to him. They’ve been tied together with string that has begun to dig grooves into the paper, and have gone slightly grimy, either on the way or in the monk’s sleeve. How long has he been keeping them there anyway?

The abbot’s name is written on the topmost one, in a familiar fastidious handwriting, and he almost refuses to take them.

“These aren’t for me,” he states, delaying the inevitable.

If he takes them, he will probably find out where he’s supposed to go. But he doesn’t _want to_. Bastards. He asked for _one_ thing. Well, ordered, he supposes. He should have known they’d never obey him.

The old monk looks back at him with wide, innocent eyes.

“Yes, I know they were sent to the abbot, but he said they were for you. I suppose your friends must have thought it more secure, sending them to the abbot. You know, just so they wouldn’t get lost on the way,” he says and winks, as Sanzo stares at him in dismay.

He takes the letters and curses Hakkai inwardly. An adress at the back of the letters shows they’ve been sent from Chengdu, two days travel from the monastery.

The door to the kitchen creaks open, the old monk’s eyes widening as he peers around Sanzo.

“Oh, good morning Jyoan!” he calls happily, even as Sanzo stiffens. Great, the last person he wanted to meet.

“Puku, coffee,” the abbot mumbles, stumbling on the single step down to the kitchen floor from the door and cursing under his breath.

“Right away, sit down,” the cook replies lightly, busying himself with a smallish pot Sanzo had missed before. He pours out a cup, the scent of coffee filling the room.

The old monk, Puku, glances his way questioningly, and he nods, eyes following the second cup the cook pulls out hungrily. Sanzo wasn’t aware they had any coffee the monastery. It meant he has spent many early morning in a miserable fog of exhaustion. Tea only does so much.

The abbot drinks his cup, then looks around the room anew, his  clearer gaze alighting on Sanzo. His eyebrows rise.

“Jīn Chánzǐ? What are you doing here?” he asks.

Sanzo puts his empty cup down on the long table scored with old knife marks and straightens his back.

“I’m leaving,” he says simply, unwilling to hedge around the truth when asked directly. “I was planning to ask for provisions.”

The abbot stares at him for a long moment, his eyes unreadable.

“I see,” he says finally, milder than Sanzo was expecting. “That’s a pity. But I presume you’ve made your decision.”

“Oh, provisions!” the cook exclaims. “We don’t have much…”

“I don’t need much either, it’s only two days journey,” Sanzo hastens to say, before he can be burdened with anything unnecessary.

“Hmm, well, I think I have some filled buns…” the man mutters, puttering about.

The abbot catches Sanzo’s eye and gestures him closer. Reluctantly, he walks the few steps to the table. Abbot Jyoan peers up at him, his spindly fingers wrapped around the half-full coffee cup.

“Since you’re leaving, there’s something I wanted to ask about,” abbot Jyoan says. “Do sit down as well, before I get a crick in my neck,” he adds, gesturing at another chair pushed under the long table.

Sanzo does.

“Your predecessor, did you ever find out who killed him,” the abbot asks, something unusually intense in his sharp gaze. Even the cook stops what he was doing, his face going solemn.

“No,” Sanzo replies, keeping his voice level. “I found a man who may have known… but he’s dead now. I doubt he’d ever have told me either way.”

“The so called Ukoku Sanzo?” Jyoan asks, and Sanzo almost starts.

“You knew him?” he asks, though of course the abbot could have simply heard of Ukoku Sanzo’s supposedly quite dramatic inauguration.  

“I knew of him,” the abbot says sourly. “Koumyou… seemed to find him of some interest, I can’t say I ever understood why. Can’t say I ever understood many of the things that man did.”

He takes a sip of coffee to punctuate the sentence. The cook snorts softly.

“That’s just how he was,” he says, fondly. “Odd to think they are gone from this world now, the sutras…”

“Puku, I told you not to speak of that!” Jyoan snaps, but the cook seems unperturbed by the admonishment.

“But there’s only us here,” he points out calmly.

Perhaps noticing Sanzo’s evil eye towards the abbot, who he had trusted not to spread the information, he adds:

“He only told me because we were all students together a long time ago, no one else.”

“Competitors,” Abbot Jyoan corrects him stiffly, and the cook shrugs.

“Competitors, students, it’s all the same in the end. Here, two days wasn’t it? This should carry you over,” He says, handing Sanzo a package wrapped in a cloth. The cloth has a pattern of cheerful, colourful chicken on it, Sanzo notes with some dismay.

Sanzo hears a dry snort, like a supressed laugh. When he looks over at abbot Jyoan, however, he is taking a sip of coffee and seemingly engrossed in the play of fire in the stove window.

“Hmph,” Jyoan clears his throat. “Do give greetings to your friends in Chengdu.”

“And thank Mr. Cho for the ointment recipe for the winter cold, it worked wonders!” the cook adds cheerfully.

Sanzo thinks of the letters with renewed dread.

Later, he stands at the crossroads where the path towards the monastery diverges from the main road, only slightly larger and winding along the foothills of the mountains. It was where they’d parted, about a year ago. Two days on foot: a pain in the ass, but nothing in comparison to other trips he has made, he thinks wryly. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, he wakes up to birdsong, obnoxiously bright and loud and near his aching head.

The ground is cold and wet underneath him, soaking through the worn cloth of his robes and the thin sleeping roll. Sanzo squints up at the sky above him, the sun barely risen, and then gives a finger to the bird peering down at him with black, round eyes. It flies away with a flutter of wings, the bough it had perched on swaying and spattering dew on Sanzo’s face.

He makes a face, groans as he rolls to get off the ground, his muscles stiff from lying on it. He sits on the bedroll, waiting for the sunlight creeping over the landscape to reach the spot where he slept, smoking a leisurely morning cigarette and thinking longingly of a steaming cup of coffee that would dispel some of the morning fuzz from his head.

His shoulders feel cold, and he pats an absent hand on one, frowning before he wakes a bit more and remembers. The reminder only puts him in a worse mood. It’s been more than a year, he should have readjusted long ago… but, he thinks glumly, maybe he never will, really.

Once his cigarette is gone, he gets up, gathers his meagre belongings and sets for the road to Chengdu. It winds around the taller hills skirting the mountains, the forested slopes disappearing into the thick morning fog that hangs over the landscape. On the other side, the Jin river stretches out in a lazy expanse of gleaming water. This early in the morning it’s still fairly cool, although the weather threatens to become hot and humid later.

Sanzo frowns up at the sun, which glows dully behind the obscuring fog. The night, spent under open sky, has been cold, the same humidity that made the heat of the day so unpleasant making all of his old injuries ache. He’s getting too old to be sleeping outside, he thinks.

Eventually, the hollow feeling in his stomach prompts him to stop and eat, but he walks a mile more, until he spots a convenient flat-topped rock at the side of the road, worn smooth by centuries of resting travellers.

As he’s rummaging in his pack, rather than the wrapped up steamed buns the monastery cook had packed, his fingers first strike upon a rumpled heap of letters, shoved in the pack haphazardly after he’d finished reading them.

Sanzo frowns, pulls the stack out and wonders why he didn’t just get rid of them.

Suddenly he isn’t in the mood to eat, but no more so to get back on the road. It’s the last day of travel, he ought to reach Chengdu before nightfall even if he rests a while.

He hears the cart from a long way off, the rattling on the uneven packed dirt loud in the early morning silence, but he keeps his gaze trained ahead, not turning even as it draws close.

“Oy, Mr. monk!” a voice hails him, and he turns reluctantly, meeting the curious gaze of the driver. A young man, barely more than a boy, driving a donkey cart piled high with what appears to be firewood.

“Need a lift?” he says, blinking at Sanzo with childish dark eyes, and he thinks of the long road behind him and the way still ahead, weighs his aching feet against the rattling of the carriage and the questions of a bored driver. 

“If you’re going to Chengdu?” he says, after a moment.

The boy grins, pointing at the logs behind him.

“Where do you think they want all this?”

Turns out the boy is a servant of a tea merchant family in the city, as he tells Sanzo with little prompting, seemingly unfazed by the surly silence from his passenger.

“So, what’s your business in Chengdu?” the boy asks.

“I’m looking for old acquaintances,” Sanzo says, reluctant despite knowing he’d have had to ask someone, eventually. “They run a coffee house, The White Dragon.”

The boy seems surprised, his round eyes widening further. “The White Dragon! I’ve heard of that place, people say it’s run by some odd strangers. No offence to yourself, of course,” he adds hastily, though also giving Sanzo a quizzical, faintly worried look.

He grunts. It’s foolish of the boy, picking up a stranger and assuming him harmless just because he looks like a monk… anyone could wear a monk’s robes. Besides, in his case, he _was_ a monk, but hardly harmless, Sanzo thinks wryly.

“They are odd,” he says, voice dry, and the boy only frowns, confused.

“If you say so… I’ve also heard they serve some good food, but I haven’t gone myself,” he adds.

Sanzo makes a noise, hoping the driver will take the hint that the conversation is over, but the boy just keeps talking. Despite the grating chatter and the bouncing of the rough wagon, Sanzo finds himself nearly dozing off. Maybe it’s the faint familiarity of it all, he might almost be back on the road west, ignoring Goku and Gojyo bickering in the backseat while Jeep’s wheels seem to drive over every single pothole on the road.

And at least he’s not walking, he thinks, grasping the side of the wagon as they go over an especially large bump, the rough wood pressing painfully into an old blister on his palm.

 “Mr. monk, you alright?” the driver asks him sometime later, his voice faintly concerned, and Sanzo opens the eyes he hasn’t noticed he has closed.

“I’m fine,” he mutters and clears his throat. It feels dusty. It probably is, at that. He feels woozy and recalls he hasn’t eaten since the evening before. Foolish.

“Ah, good. We’re almost there, you’ll be able to see the city right after this bend, it’s quite a sight,” the boy says, his mouth widening into a smile that shows a gap where he has lost a molar.

Sanzo sighs inwardly and trains his gaze forward. Certainly, there is the city, most of it visible from the hill the road is just cresting. It’s painted golden by the evening light, a sprawl of houses with shingled roofs.

 “I think the White Dragon is over there in the western part, though you might have to ask again closer to it. I’ve never been myself, like I said,” the driver says with an apologetic shrug.

Sanzo nods tightly. Clearly those three have already made a reputation for themselves, so they couldn’t be that hard to find, he thinks resignedly. He could only hope they hadn’t said too much and pre-emptively blown his cover.

Later, he parts ways with the driver and walks away into the city proper. The big mansions, one of which the driver had headed towards, are concentrated in the centre and the eastern quarter. In contrast, the western part is clearly a commercial area. It seems l like a thriving city, or at least as thriving as can be expected just a year after the minus wave.

If he searches for it, he can see the marks of it here, the occasional empty storefront here, the hollow eyes above a forced smile there. The city wears the marks of past trouble like bruises hidden under make-up. Get up and carry on, it seems to say. 

The sun is still up, although the light has gone rosy with evening, and the street he walks along is busy with people, lined by shops, teahouses and restaurants.

A fashionably dressed man walking with a suspiciously admiring and young companion on his arm almost barges into Sanzo, glowering at him as the young woman on his arm croons soothingly. Her eyes flicker towards him, curious for a fleeting second before turning back towards the man with professional dedication.

“It’s only a monk,” she says, placatingly, as the man sneers at Sanzo.

He walks by them. They don’t matter. He asks for advice from a rikshaw driver loitering outside a large restaurant and receives annoyingly complex instructions that leave him walking up and down nearly identical streets that connect in confusing ways. Sometimes they are so narrow there’s barely room for two people to pass.

Finally, he decides to ask again. The first person he sees is an old woman setting up a lantern in preparation of the dark.

“You,” he says, and the woman starts, turning towards Sanzo. Her face does an odd shift between a reflexive professional smile and then souring at the sight of a ragged monk. She probably thinks Sanzo is going to beg her for alms, he realizes irritably.

“You know a shop called the White Dragon?” he says before the woman can tell him to get lost, as she’s clearly getting ready to do.

“Oh. The White Dragon? The coffeeshop?” faint relief floods the woman’s face, and she points back the way Sanzo had been walking from. “If you turn left after the shop selling leather goods, then go past the teashop and turn right, and then pass through the little alley after the old gate with the willow tree… look closely, it’s a narrow one. Well, the house is on that street.”

Something in Sanzo’s expression makes her chuckle.

“I know, it’s something of a labyrinth here. But you aren’t that far away,” she tells him in a maternal tone.  

Is everyone in this city this chatty, Sanzo wonders, thanking the woman briefly and following the new instructions before he can forget them. The last street is indeed narrow, and almost hidden by the tree. He might have wandered around for a while if he hadn’t asked.

And then, after he exits the last narrow alley, he knows exactly where he is going, because he can see the evening light striking a familiar and unmistakable head of red hair.

Gojyo’s lounging on a bench in front of the shop, hair pulled up in a ponytail and smoking a cigarette, seemingly in no hurry to finish it. The restaurant front is neat, recently renovated in warm toned wood and the banner proclaiming the name outside probably Hakkai’s handiwork. The building it’s in has two stories, the upper floor fronted by a balcony with plants hanging down from it.  

It would be his luck, Sanzo thinks, for Gojyo to be the first person he runs into.

He could wait, but that would be the coward’s choice, so he strides forward, waits for Gojyo to see him. He can tell the moment he does, with his red eyes widening and his hand freezing with the cigarette in it still burning away.

“Yo,” Sanzo says, keeping his voice even. Show no weakness, no hesitation, no regret. Even now, he doesn’t know if coming back is the right choice, if there is one.

Objectively, it’s certainly not a pious choice, but when has he ever been that. He tried it, it didn’t work. Either time.

“So, you’re here,” Gojyo says. As he leans forward, chunks of his hair that haven’t been caught by the ponytail fall forward and obscure his expression for a moment, until he stands up, arms swinging loosely at his sides. He steps forward, and there is a subtle threat in the movement, in the low growl of his next words:

“Took your time, didn’t you?”

Like it was a given that Sanzo would return. He raises an eyebrow at that. He feels a smile on his face, a vicious, harsh thing.

“Bold of you to assume I was coming back,” he says, challengingly.

Gojyo’s eyebrows furrow, and Sanzo can see his teeth press together. Then he shakes his head.

“I ought to punch you, for putting Hakkai and Goku through that. They’ve missed you, for some reason.”

He moves forward suddenly, and Sanzo falls back, expecting the attack Gojyo just threatened. Instead, what he gets is an arm around his shoulders and Gojyo’s hair in his face, along with nearly violent pats to his back. Gojyo’s voice is gratingly loud in his ear, this close.

“It’s good to have you back though,” he says, and he’s grinning like an idiot when he pulls back, the smile gaining a more devious edge at whatever he sees on Sanzo’s face. “Don’t get too excited, Cherry-chan, only thinking of how mad those two would be if I scared you away after all this time. Even _Goku_ was writing you letters, and I can tell you that wasn’t easy for the monkey.”

He shakes his head in faux-dismay, and Sanzo thinks of the letters in his pack, Goku’s large, carefully if inexpertly drawn letters in among Hakkai’s elegant calligraphy.

They’d both written to the abbot to enquire after Sanzo. The idea of him reading them had caused Sanzo’s stomach to sour with embarrassment as he read them at the crossroads. Hakkai had at least been, on the surface, subtle about it, the tone of the letters carefully formal, but if Sanzo could easily read his sentimental worry between the lines, he feared abbot Jyoan could too. And Goku… Goku had little subtlety at the best of times, and even less so in writing. 

 _’Please make sure he’s staying warm and not forgetting to eat, with the winter like this,’_ he recalls, the pinch of mortification as strong now as it was then.

Damn them.

Gojyo is still assessing him, red eyes narrowed, before he glances towards the doorway, something pensive stealing over his features.

“Are you… are you just passing through or?” he asks, whatever conflict he is struggling with clear on his face as usual.

Sanzo crosses his arms, just on principle.

“What if I was?” he asks, and Gojyo gives him a mulish glare in return.

“Shut up!” he says, temper flaring and then settling just as fast. “You’ve no right to…” he mutters, but doesn’t finish the sentence, his voice cut off by a frustrated silence.

That’s Gojyo all over, Sanzo thinks, no real bark to his bite.

“Just come in, they’ll want to see you anyway,” he says, his gaze just briefly landing on Sanzo before turning away again, fastening on something on the other side of the street. “Goku’s out, but he’s supposed to come in for dinner soon… he really has missed you, you know,” he adds, quietly, and it’s so unlike Gojyo’s usual loud accusations that it sneaks in through Sanzo’s defences.

Has he? How bad has it been to make Gojyo sound like that? It reminds him, for a jarring moment, of standing in a street that stank of blood and drowning in a feeling of uselessness.

But this isn’t like that. Gojyo is just being a bleeding heart as usual.

The interior of the shop, just like the front, bears the mark of having been put together by Hakkai. There’s a rich smell of coffee in the air, with an undernote of baked dough and sugar. Everything is neat, clean and chosen with good taste. He wonders uncharitably if Gojyo ever feels out of place there, like he clashes with the decor. But then Gojyo weaves around the small tables with the green and white tablecloths with ease and leans over the counter with every impression of being at home. And now that Sanzo thinks about it, he’s dressed up just enough to not quite look like a waiter, in dark slacks and a wine-red button down. So Hakkai has cleaned up the kappa as well, at last?

There are no customers, except for a man sitting at the back corner of the store in a leather armchair set next to brass lamp and in front of a shelf of books. He’s reading, though when Sanzo glances his way the man is regarding him with mild curiosity over half-moon spectacles. He has the mien of an idle scholar, Sanzo notes offhandedly.

“Hakkai!” Gojyo calls towards the curtained doorway behind the counter. His long fingers tap onto the varnished wood of the counter he is leaning on. The counter is made in dark gleaming wood and spotless glass. The trays behind the glass are mostly empty and clean, with just a few holding pastries still.

The curtain moves, admitting Hakkai, who peers through the doorway with a quizzical expression before he spots Sanzo standing behind Gojyo. He stares at him for a moment blankly, before his eyes widen subtly.

“San—” he begins to say, before blinking, his eyes moving rapidly, presumably towards the single customer in the room with them. “Jīn.” Hakkai amends, then goes quiet, for once struck wordless.

Sanzo resist the urge to shift where he stands under the awkward silence. Gojyo’s the one to break it, with a brash and cheerful, if slightly fake:

“About time, huh?”

Hakkai smiles, one of his reflexive fake smiles, while presumably his brain is whirring away trying to catch up to the situation. He, like Sanzo himself, probably wasn’t expecting this. He is, after all, a pessimist.

It’s an uncomfortable thought, but Sanzo lets it pass through and depart. Clearly, they have done well enough in his absence. Hakkai and Gojyo may consider him a… friend, presumably, but they’ve always been self-sufficient, more or less.

“Ah, yes,” Hakkai says softly, before glancing at the clock on the wall. “Goku should be on his way as well, unless he’s working overtime.”

He puts on an even more professional mask and calls softly across the room towards the man at the back.

“Mr Chao! We’ll be closing in just a moment,” he says, politely but firmly.

The man looks up from the book in his hands, nods and gets up from his chair. He saunters over, handing the book directly to Hakkai.

“It’s very interesting, thank you for the loan. I’d be thankful to read more at another time,” he says in a soft, cultured voice. “A guest?” he asks, with another glance towards Sanzo. This time, he notices something sharp and evaluating there, more than just idle curiosity.

Hakkai’s reply is reserved, the polite smile not quite reaching his eyes.

“Oh, you may borrow the book if you’d like, I’ve already read it a few times,” Hakkai says with a fake laugh, and then nods towards Sanzo.

“This is Jīn Chánzǐ, an old acquaintance,” he says. “Jīn, this is Mr. Da Chao, a scholar.”

The man bows, peering at Sanzo still with that penetrating curiosity. He doesn’t like it.

“Ah, Golden Cicada, like the disciple of Buddha?” he says.

Sanzo shrugs.

“Didn’t choose it myself,” he says flatly, and the man leans back, noticing the tone.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve had a long journey and will want to catch up with your friends,” he says stiffly, the glint of curiosity cooled off by offence, which Sanzo is glad for. “Good evening to you both, and give my greetings to Mr. Son,” he adds to Hakkai and Gojyo.

“Certainly, Mr. Chao,” Hakkai says, smiling. He is, Sanzo notices, meanly amused under the polite mask.

Chao frowns minutely, but then nods and leaves.

Gojyo watches after him, an odd expression, before glancing at Sanzo and then Hakkai.

“What’s with him?” Sanzo asks irritably, and Gojyo looks back at him blankly.

“Chao? Uh, nothing. He’s just a bookworm,” he lies obviously.

Hakkai gives him a flat stare and sighs.

“He is a rather renowned scholar in the field of ancient poetry,” he says dryly, while Gojyo snorts.

“Right,” he says. “Anyway, it’s your fault for leaving out all those books,” he adds, causing Hakkai to shake his head and his mouth to twist into something sour.

He turns, muttering something Sanzo doesn’t quite catch, before stepping behind the curtain again. They can hear his voice, muffled by the cloth, as well as a higher, feminine voice replying over the sound of water and clattering porcelain.

“He’ll be sending Min home early,” Gojyo says in explanation. “She works in the kitchen now and again, dishes and such” he adds as if Sanzo cares.

Gojyo’s leaning on the counter, still ludicrously out of place against the backdrop of Hakkai’s finicky little café, Sanzo thinks, even in the outfit. He’d look more at home in a bar, or that shack he and Hakkai used to live in.  

Sanzo had never spent much time there, but he recalls the feeling of the place even now. A worn-down house, practically an extension of the pervert kappa. Seeing Hakkai fussing over the pockmarked kitchen counters, rubbed to gleaming by vigorous cleaning, had used to make him faintly uncomfortable. Like he was watching something he didn’t want to witness. Typical Hakkai, making cleaning a ramshackle house into some strange act of devotion.

He realizes, unpleasantly, that Gojyo is observing him. He turns his gaze away when he realizes Sanzo has notices.

“Don’t be surprised if things have changed,” he says quietly. “That happens when you leave, you know.”

Sanzo doesn’t dignify that with a response.

A girl comes out from behind the curtain, nondescript, the smell of dish soap stuck to her and water droplets on her dress. Sanzo ignores her once-over of him, and her taking leave of Gojyo. They both sound cheerful, but not flirty, he notes distantly.

Maybe Gojyo’s finally been tamed, he thinks meanly.

Hakkai reappears and bustles about the room, turning the sign at the door to closed, righting items that were already in place.

“I’ve been making stew,” he tells Sanzo. “Nothing special, since we didn’t know you were coming.”

He’s almost babbling, a gleam in his eyes that might be nerves, or something else. Sanzo doesn’t care about the food, which Hakkai knows, even though there’s a gnawing emptiness in his stomach. He should have eaten something before after all.

 “It’s—” Gojyo begins, seems to bite off whatever he was going to say, and continues instead: “It’ll be good, whatever,” his voice rough.

Hakkai smiles at him, something going soft behind his eyes, and ugh, Sanzo doesn’t want to see this. He supposes they finally worked out the thing that had been there, ever since before the journey. He’s not sure if the nausea he’s feeling is disgust or hunger pangs. Either way it’s annoying.

He fights the urge to snap at them, knowing its irrational.

“Come in to the kitchen, we’ll be eating there as soon as Goku arrives,” Hakkai says, not quite meeting Sanzo’s gaze before disappearing back behind the curtain.

Gojyo does give him a look like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t, in the end.

The kitchen behind the curtain isn’t large, but big enough to fit in a table that seats four. Hakkai has already set the table, pots of stew and rice in the middle.

Gojyo sits down right away, his chair scraping across the tiled floor while Hakkai frowns at him without much heat. Hakkai’s still puttering, clearly doing his best to avoid being idle. A silence hangs over them, uncomfortable.

Sanzo looks around the kitchen, preferring to inspect his surroundings rather than acknowledge that. It’s… a kitchen. Better than Gojyo’s old house, probably, but not new either. Better cared for, perhaps. The kitchen tiles are a burnt orange with a brown pattern. The cabinets are bottle green. Somehow, it’s not completely obnoxious put together, and Sanzo is faintly impressed.

There’s a fridge that seems slightly oversized along the wall towards the serving room, cramped next to the door with the curtain over it. On the wall opposite, there’s a proper door. Probably leading to stairs to the rooms upstairs, and maybe a backdoor.

“Where’s that monkey anyway? If he doesn’t come soon, I’ll eat his portion,” Gojyo says, breaking the silence.

“Now, he’s doing an important job as a fireman,” Hakkai demurs.

“Sure he is, I bet he’s eating somewhere with the guys,” Gojyo replies with a fake grin, while Hakkai shakes his head at him.

It’s like they are actors playing at themselves, acting out a normal evening. It’s giving Sanzo a headache.

And then, the sound of a key beyond the closed door at the back, a familiar voice calling out a greeting. Hakkai and Gojyo go still and almost alert, but Sanzo doesn’t pay them any mind.

Goku opens the door, with some difficulty due to the large paper bag he’s holding. He’s… bulkier, Sanzo notes with little surprise. More muscled, less thin. Without the near starvation on the journey, it was bound to happen.

“Hakkai, Liu gave me some of yesterday’s—”

His words break off as he glances up, mouth still open and blinking rapidly. His hair is longer, pulled into a bristly ponytail at the back of his head, and there’s a healing scrape on his face, a red line on his lower jaw.

“…Sanzo?” he says, after a beat, voice oddly blank.

Sanzo finds with a jolt that he cannot read Goku’s expression, not right away. Whatever is happening in his brain, whatever emotions flicker and disappear in that moment, it might as well be writing in a language he doesn’t read.

He thinks, for a moment, that he shouldn’t have come here. Should have walked in the opposite direction and never looked back. And then he steels himself, squares his shoulders, says:

“Goku.”

It’s like a spell has been broken, and Goku moves forward, a smile rising on his face like the sun, warm and uncomplicated and just as bright.

“Sanzo!” he repeats, too loudly, laughter in his voice.

He doesn’t step back; doesn’t try to dodge the hug he knows is coming and… Goku stops in front of him. He frowns, looking at Sanzo with an uncomfortably keen expression in his golden eyes.

“Sanzo,” he says, half a question and half something solemn, and he’s still frowning.

“Great, I think you broke him,” Gojyo mutters to the side, prompting Goku to turn and glare at him.

“Shut up!” he snaps, sharper than Sanzo expected, and he almost starts but Gojyo doesn’t, only grinning unrepentantly at Goku.

“Sure, seemed like you just forgot all words except one right there,” he teases, and Goku flushes and steps back, which is what makes Sanzo suddenly aware how close they’d been before, how that might have seemed to the other two men in the room.

Whatever, he thinks, it’s only Goku. And Goku hadn’t even touched him, which, he tells himself, was a pleasant surprise.

Goku is staring at him again, Sanzo finds.

“You shaved your head,” he says, suddenly, head tilting as if he just noticed.

Sanzo resists the urge to move, to run a hand over where he knows stubble is just starting to cover his head. His fingers twitch once, and still.

“Yes,” he replies, imbuing it with all he should think about such an obvious statement of facts.

“Huh,” Goku says, and then shrugs. “It’s different, but not—” he doesn’t finish the sentence, turning abruptly towards where Hakkai has been hovering on the other side of the table, and thrusts the paper bag towards him.

“It’s—” he looks down to the bag as if having momentarily forgotten what it held. “Wheat buns. Yesterday’s.”

“Ah, from the baker?” Hakkai says, accepting the bag.

Goku nods, but he seems oddly disconnected from the talk of food. He keeps glancing at Sanzo, as if checking to see if he’s still there, and something about it causes an unfamiliar ache in his chest.

And then, there is a faint growling sound, and Goku blinks, glancing down at his own stomach as if expecting it to have been the source of the sound.

The kitchen is utterly, utterly silent, and then Goku ventures, his eyes wide.

“Sanzo, are you… hungry?”

Gojyo begins to laugh, a braying, unutterably infuriating sound. He sounds incredulous, wheezing helplessly after a few seconds, and Sanzo hopes sincerely that he chokes on his own spit and dies, even as he feels his face heat up.

“No,” he says, the sound coming out through grit teeth. “In fact, I’m going,” he adds, turning on his heels and exiting through the curtain into the empty serving room.

“Gojyo, please, it’s not that funny,” he hears behind him, in Hakkai’s exasperated voice, and the idiot kappa trying to say something and failing, his words drowned out by more laughter.

But above all that, he can hear footsteps, heavy and fast on the old floorboards.

“Wait,” Goku says, reaching him before he has passed the midpoint of the room. He sounds out of breath. Sanzo doesn’t turn around, not when a hand settles on his arm, not when a weight settles between his shoulder blades. Goku breathes, shakily, and Sanzo can feel it through the rough cotton of his robes.

Goku’s hand on his arm, his forehead on his back are points of warmth that he tries not to think about.

“You,” Goku says.

He doesn’t know what to say to him, Sanzo realizes, and it shouldn’t feel like a punch to the gut. Goku never hesitates to speak, even when he should.

“You left,” Goku says, charging onwards with grim determination. It’s not accusing, it’s only a statement of facts. “You… you weren’t planning to come back, were you?”

Sanzo cannot see his face, but he hears the frown there. This one, he knows. It’s Goku trying to figure something out, and he closes his eyes and breathes out, and in.

“No, I wasn’t,” he agrees.

The embarrassment from before has passed, eclipsed by whatever this is. It feels like walking in complete darkness, not knowing if there’ll still be ground beneath his next step.

Goku sighs, another puff of air that tickles Sanzo’s neck, the bare skin there.

“But you did.” Goku says, some certainty solidifying in the words. “I knew you would, somehow.”

Sanzo doesn’t answer, not sure himself if he’s afraid his voice might show things he’s not prepared to give away, or if he’s just not ready to hear what Goku has realized. Maybe both.

After a moment, Goku says:

“Let’s go back. I’m hungry. And you should eat as well.”

Sanzo turns, now, and Goku takes a step back, doesn’t crowd him. His voice had been quiet, almost sad, but he’s smiling. A small, soft smile, with that same solemnity at its edges.

Sanzo looks at him properly, willing himself to see what is in front of him without the shades of what has been. Not the child in the cave, not the loud pest that hounded his every step (and, though he will never admit it, anchored him to the moment when the past and future threatened to tear him apart). Not the teen that had turned his way for reassurance, either.

A young man, with kind eyes. More shadows in them than there used to be, but more depth as well, more room for joy. Still a wise fool, probably, and Sanzo sighs, lets the air out of his lungs in a rapid gust of air, shakes his head as if to clear away any remaining cobwebs.

He really had been stalling, at the monastery, he thinks irritably. And he barely even knows why. He won’t figure it out now either, not tired and yes, hungry.

“Hmph,” he says, “very well.”

Goku’s eyes crinkle as he smiles, and then he rocks forward, reaches out a hand to drag it over Sanzo’s scalp, the touch startling on the almost bare skin.

“It’s prickly,” he says, and Sanzo snorts.

“No shit,” he growls, and Goku laughs, once again familiar and easy.

“You know, if Gojyo calls you baldy now… he’d be kinda correct,” Goku says thoughtfully.

“He’s dead if he does,” Sanzo replies, falling into old patterns himself, but momentarily not caring.

Goku hums, and tugs him back towards the kitchen, his fingers carelessly wrapped around Sanzo’s wrist.

“Will you let it grow back?” Goku asks, with light curiosity, as if it doesn’t matter to him either way.

Sanzo has never thought himself vain, more the opposite, but he remembers the first time he’d seen himself in a mirror after the shave. How much starker his features had been without the hair, and worse, how unfamiliar. He’d never wanted to be pretty, he’d thought then. He should have done it years ago, if it hadn’t been impractical on the road.

But if it didn’t matter, why do it at all?

“Maybe,” Sanzo replies noncommittally.

Goku lets his wrist go just before they walk through the curtain.

Maybe it’s because he’s grown unaccustomed to touches, Sanzo thinks later, sitting at the table with the familiar rise and fall of patter from the three idiots around him and slowly eating Hakkai’s stew with rice. That must be why it feels like he can still feel the light press of Goku’s fingers on his pulse point.

He frowns down into his plate and tries to ignore it. For now, at least.

“--And then Yun just looks at this guy, and she doesn’t even say anything but her face…!” Goku’s words dissolve into laughter.

“I can imagine,” Gojyo says dryly.

Sanzo realizes he has missed most of the story, something about a rude guy and Goku’s co-worker. He works as a fireman, when he isn’t assisting Gojyo in building work, or at his landlady’s brother’s bakery, the Liu of the wheat buns. He seems to keep a busy schedule, which makes sense with all the energy he’s always had.

The food Sanzo had eaten settles heavily in his previously empty stomach and the wear of the journey has caught up to him again. If he doesn’t watch out, he’ll fall asleep in his chair. And still, he realizes that Hakkai has fallen quiet since a while ago, some tension radiating out from him. Gojyo and Goku have been skirting around that silence, filling it up with their chatter.

Hakkai is frowning and staring down at his empty plate, fingers crossed in front of him. And then he looks up, the light from the lamp above the table reflects off his glasses and hides his eyes. He smiles, but it’s stiff.

“I should go see about the quest room, make it ready,” he says, voice too studiedly soft.

“Ah,” Goku says, “I was thinking I could, uh, stay over as well? Since it’s a bit late now and all?”

He’s talking with Hakkai, but glances at Sanzo as well, as if asking permission.

“We’d have to share though, there are only two rooms,” Goku tells him, his cheeks faintly flushed. “I mean, I can also just go home…”

Sanzo shrugs. It doesn’t matter to him, they’ve all had to share housing often enough on the journey.

Goku smiles at him, relieved and almost too bright. Sanzo wonders if his absence had somehow made him unused to that, because the smile makes something warm inside him, like stepping out into spring sunlight after a long, gruelling winter.

“Certainly Goku, you know you’re always welcome, I’ll just set out bedding for two,” Hakkai murmurs.

“I’ll help!” Goku offers, and Hakkai gives him a warm smile, before turning to Gojyo.

“Will you take care of the washing?” he asks, and Gojyo gives him a lazy salute.

“Sure thing.”

“He trusts you to wash dishes now,” Sanzo says, almost genuinely surprised.

Gojyo, who has just gotten up to pick up his own plate shrugs.

“Keep talking like that and I’ll make _you_ do it,” he retorts, before shaking his head and gathering the rest of the dishes and taking them over to the sink with practiced moves.

“You’ll have to find something to do if you’re staying,” he says, just a bit too lightly, before turning back from the sink now filling with water and suds with a smirk. “Maybe we’ll dress you up as a maid, that might draw in some customers,” Gojyo says and laughs.

Sanzo finds that he doesn’t even have the energy to get angry, not when Gojyo doesn’t mean it in the slightest and they both know it. Besides, he’s right, about him having to find something to do if he stays.

“Is that what your job is?” Sanzo asks, keeping his voice uninterested, and Gojyo shrugs easily.

“I help out, but Hakkai mostly handles the café well enough on his own and with Min’s help. I do some work around town, building and house renovations and whatever. Goku as well, sometimes. When he’s not at the bakery or training or putting out a fire.”

Sanzo makes a humming sound in reply, pulling out a cigarette.

“Hakkai’s gonna be pissed if you light that here,” Gojyo says mildly. “You don’t want to do that right now.”

“Oh yeah?” Sanzo says, nettled despite Gojyo’s easy tone, or maybe because of it.

Gojyo gives him a level stare over his shoulder. “I’m just saying, he’s already mad at you, and I’m not allowed to smoke in the kitchen either. And to be honest, you don’t look up to dealing with him right now.”

Sanzo is very tempted to light up anyway just to spite him, but Gojyo is unfortunately right. He’s too tired to deal with whatever Hakkai’s issues are right now.

Still, he needs the nicotine.

“I’m going out,” he grunts, getting up and pretending he doesn’t have to lean heavily on the table to do so.

“Uhuh,” Gojyo says, by then drying up the washed plates. He hasn’t touched the pots on the table, so maybe Hakkai only trusts him with _some_ washing, after all.

The door at the back does indeed leading both to a set of stairs going up as well as a door to a back alley, just like Sanzo expected. It’s as narrow as some he’d passed through earlier, almost blocked by trash cans from the businesses that line it.

The street disappears around a curve off to the right, mostly dark except for a few lights on in upper floor windows. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear faint music and raucous voices, but it barely reaches. 

He leans onto the back wall and smokes, watching the smoke trail off into the dark sky above the roof opposite. The city’s lights are blocking some of the stars, making the sky flatter than he’s used to.

The door beside him opens, footsteps scuffing on the double steps down to the street.

Sanzo lets the smoke he had drawn in escape along with a sigh.

“Hakkai,” he says, dryly.

“Sanzo,” Hakkai replies, his voice equally flat.

They stand in silence, only broken by a door opening to the left, a business owner taking out a bag of trash and calling out an amiable greeting to Hakkai.

Sanzo’s cigarette is almost gone by the time Hakkai speaks.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Sanzo huffs out a frustrated breath, and Hakkai continues, his voice tense.

“I understand you felt at a loss after everything, and I’m glad you are here now but—”

“Shut up,” Sanzo hisses at him. “You understand?” he says, mocking Hakkai’s faux-sympathetic tone. “You don’t understand shit, and that pisses you off, doesn’t it?”

Hakkai doesn’t move at his side. He _growls_ , and some primeval instinct tells Sanzo to run, right now. He doesn’t move either, doesn’t even glance Hakkai’s way.

“You know what? You’re right. I _don’t_ understand what made you think you could just walk away after everything we went through. Maybe that’s not fair, but I’ve found a lot of things in life aren’t, so if so, too bad.”

His voice vibrates, as if he’s barely supressing something. He turns, sharply, momentarily more a stalking animal than a man. The door closes behind him, not with a slam but with a soft click that manages to be somehow more ominous.

Sanzo lets his shoulders slump against the wall in defeat. He is too tired for this.

The door opens again, this time admitting Goku, slightly wide-eyed.

“What?” Sanzo asks. He feels dull with exhaustion.

“I saw Hakkai coming in and he seemed…” Goku makes a face.

Sanzo shrugs. It’s Hakkai’s problem, not his.

Goku sighs, sidling over to Sanzo’s side in an odd reflection of Hakkai before, but far more comfortable. His shoulder ends up so close to Sanzo’s that he could swear he can feel the warmth radiating from it.

“I think he thinks I missed you more than I did, or something.” He says, almost philosophically, his eyes trained on the distant stars. “I mean, I did of course. But I did all right. Still, it’s Hakkai,” he adds, as if that explains everything. Maybe a year ago, it would have.

Or maybe not, Goku’s always seen some things clearer than Sanzo could, even as a foolish child.

“The rooms ready, if you want to sleep,” Goku tells him, an odd note in his voice, and Sanzo realizes he has closed his eyes and his cigarette has fallen down from his lax fingers sometimes he wasn’t paying attention.

He grunts in reply and doesn’t protest when there is a nudge on his arm, Goku pushing him in through the door. He follows him up the stairs, hovering just by him as if he might stumble and fall any moment otherwise.

Sanzo could tell him to stop it, but he’s too tired. He has a faint impression of a small room with a sloping roof and a tiny stove in the corner close to the door, a bed nestled along each wall. Two of them, even though he hadn’t meant to come back, but he doesn’t think too closely on that.

The room is warm, and Goku sits down on one of the beds, leaving the one closer to the stove free. On it, a shirt is laid out, a long one he recognizes as one of his own. Bought and maintained by Hakkai somewhere on the journey. It was too loose and not something he wore regularly. Mostly, he’d worn it after he’d gotten injured and his robes had to be washed.

He can almost hear it, Hakkai complaining how much work it was getting blood off of white cloth.

He’d burned what was left of them, after Houtou. There’d been no point keeping them.

“You ok?” Goku’s voice comes from behind him, and Sanzo realises he’s been standing there, staring at the white cotton shirt with pale grey stripes.

“Nothing,” he grunts, before getting ready for bed as efficiently as he can. His robes are easy to discard on the back of a chair, and there is a wash bowl and a bar of soap left on the nightstand, the water warm. It’s a relief to use them after the long walk from the monastery, as rudimentary a was as it is. He’ll have to ask Gojyo about a public bath in the morning.

“I’ll try not to wake you in the morning,” Goku says, half-way apologetic. “I got a job to help out at Liu’s bakery tomorrow, with one of his workers sick.”

Sanzo nods, drying his upper body briskly. The towel goes on his robes on the chair, and then he only needs to shrug the sleep shirt on and get in between the sheets.

The stove is small, but so is the room, and he can feel the heat it emits on his toes, very different from sleeping in a forest, or even the clammy room at the monastery. He sighs, feeling his body fold out fully in what feels like forever.

Footsteps, almost soundless even on the creaking old floorboards, but he doesn’t open his eyes. It’s only Goku.

“Is it warm enough?” he asks, and Sanzo hums, too close to sleep already to muster more of a response. “I’m glad,” he hears, the words distant. Even further away, there still the distant voices of a bar, and the closer muffled voices of Gojyo and Hakkai downstairs. None of it is enough to keep Sanzo from slipping fully into dreamless, deep sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

He wakes up to the slight noises of Goku walking across the creaky floor and getting dressed, still tired, but too used to getting up early at the monastery. Sanzo squints at the room, blurry through his sleep-addled eyes. He’s been considering wearing glasses more often, lately, not just for reading. Having to squint at things is getting to be a pain.

“Oh, sorry,” Goku says, his voice whispery. “You can sleep on if you want…”

Sanzo grunts and sits up, regretting it immediately.

“I’ll go put some coffee on,” Goku says, his voice faintly amused. “It’ll be downstairs if you’re getting up.”

“Hrgh,” Sanzo replies, his head still feeling woolly. It’ll be like that until he wakes properly, he knows.

By the time he stumbles downstairs, there is indeed coffee, set at the place where he sat last evening, as well as a bowl of congee.

Sanzo focuses on the coffee, the fog in his head slowly clearing as he sips the bitter liquid.

Goku sits down at the table and stars wolfing down his own breakfast. Occasionally, he stops to grin at Sanzo for seemingly no reason. Sanzo could question him on it, but he has an idea why it’s happening. Better to just ignore it. Just like he’s ignoring any reasons he felt like getting up just to have breakfast with Goku. It does also have the added benefit of not needing to meet Hakkai before he has had coffee.

As if called by his thoughts, there’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and then a: “Good morning,” in a familiar voice behind him.

“Good morning Hakkai!” Goku calls back. “I warmed the congee.”

“Oh, thank you,” Hakkai replies with genuine warmth, drifting over to the counter to get a bowl of his own. “It’ll speed up opening, having the coffee ready as well,” he says, as Goku nods while still shovelling in his food.

“I see you’re also awake,” Hakkai adds in Sanzo’s direction, his voice noticeably cooler.

Goku glances furtively between the two of them and makes a face that he probably thinks is subtle.

“Gojyo’s still asleep, huh?” he babbles. “Doesn’t he have a job with Wei and his guys? His son mentioned that the other day, some big house a merchant family is building.”

“Oh yes. I’ll wake him up before he’ll be late,” Hakkai replies, but his body language is still stiff when he sits down, his bowl meeting the table with a sharp click.

“So uh… want to walk with me? I can show you at least a part of the city,” Goku asks Sanzo, faintly desperately.

Giving him a way out of being alone with Hakkai, at least for a while. He doesn’t need it, he can deal with Hakkai being pissy. And yet.

“You can meet the people at the bakery!” Goku adds, clearly warming up to his own idea. “And there’s a little serving area, with some newspapers, uncle Liu won’t mind you hanging around for a bit, he says customers always bring in customers.”

“I’m not exactly a customer,” Sanzo points out, and Goku shrugs.

“Not like people will know that.”

“It’s true, at least in a café…” Hakkai says in a pondering tone. “Or maybe it’s that people drop in at similar times. Ah, I should get started on the breakfast foods, it’ll be opening time soon. Time for you to be going too, right Goku?” he adds gently, causing Goku to start.

“Oh!” he says, his eyes widening as he turns towards the clock.

“You coming too?” he asks Sanzo. “I can wait a few more minutes if you want…”

By the way he just sprung up from his chair and the hurried movements as he scrubs his bowl in the sink, he doesn’t really have that time.

“Hn, fine,” Sanzo replies, after considering the chilly atmosphere still emanating from Hakkai. He’ll have to deal with that soon enough, but he doesn’t really feel like it at the moment.

Goku seems inordinately pleased at the announcement: “Great! I’ll just go get my things from upstairs, be back in a second!”

His footsteps practically thunder up the stairs, and a smile tugs at Hakkai’s lips before he notices Sanzo looking at him.

“It’s good to see him so happy…” Hakkai mutters, with a pointed look towards Sanzo.

What was it Goku said last night, that he thinks Hakkai bears a grudge on his behalf? Foolish. Goku said himself he was fine. Sanzo isn’t surprised, he’s always been the strongest out of them all, and not just physically.

Still.

“It is,” he says, and it’s worth it to see Hakkai blink in surprise at the admission. Serves him right.

Later, as they are walking towards the bakery Goku works in, Sanzo notes how many people Goku greets on the way, the smiles and curious glances his way. He’d worn civilian clothes that morning, a set he’d found on the chair in the room in place of his dirty clothing. He didn’t know if it had been Goku or Hakkai who’d put them there, and it didn’t really matter either.

The streets they walk along are busy but in a different way than the previous night, now populated by sleepy workers setting up business or on the way to their jobs.

Goku keeps up a stream of chatter, most of which Sanzo notes only superficially. He is well settled here, as well as he ever was at Chang’an. Better, most likely, because he has a place here, not as a dependant and hanger-on, but as someone people recognize and greet in the street.

Sanzo will never be that universally liked, and wouldn’t care to be, he thinks wryly. It is refreshing, in a way, to not be recognized as someone unusual either.

“Has anyone… asked questions?” he asks, reminded by the thought.

“We told people we’d been travelling, during the bad times,” Goku says, easily changing tack from whatever he’d been explaining before. “It’s not unusual, a lot of people left where they lived… it was dangerous, but so was staying in place, unless you lived in a fortress town.”

He looks at Sanzo and shrugs.

“A few people figured out we might be youkai, but it’s… none of them have made trouble.”

“Hm.”

They walk on in silence, until they arrive at a squat building, sandwiched between a warehouse and a butcher shop. Goku ducks down a narrow path to get at the back of the bakery and Sanzo follows him. He finds himself on another narrow back-alley, the smell from the butcher shop’s waste pungent. The scent of blood and entrails, after so long, is—

He stops, still standing in the gap between the two buildings, one foot on scraggly grass and the other on hard-tramped clay.

“What is it?” Goku asks, his forehead furrowed.

“Nothing,” Sanzo replies, shaking his head sharply. Blood hasn’t bothered him in years, not blood of sentient beings he’d killed himself in cold blood. So why should that of dumb animals do so now. It makes no sense.

Goku’s still perusing him with an annoyingly careful look, and Sanzo frowns at him, shakes his head with more purpose.

“Nothing important,” he repeats, and Goku nods.

“Ok,” he says.

“Goku,” a female voice calls, and he blinks and turns to the side.

“Yun! Good morning!” he greets back, stepping further into the street.

Sanzo follows, slightly reluctantly.

A young woman stands in the alley, dark hair pulled back into a white cap. Of median height and gangly with wide shoulders. Not pretty, but there is something striking about the lines of her face and her dark eyes that might be called handsome, Sanzo notes dispassionately. She holds a cigarette in one hand.

“You’re late,” she tells Goku, “Old man’s gonna scold you,” she tells him, abrupt but without much heat behind it.

Goku shrugs, not seeming overly concerned.

“My, ah, old friend came to visit last night. I forgot the time,” he explains, and something about the bashful tone of the words makes Sanzo feel inexplicably embarrassed.

“Oh, that him?” the woman, who cannot be much older than Goku’s age, says, and the canny way she inspects him makes it worse. “The monk? He said he had an old friend who became a monk,” she says, the last towards Sanzo.

“Yeah,” Sanzo says, short and inviting no further question. He could say he was always a monk, but it’s unnecessary information. Reveals too much.

She studies him for a moment more, then turns to Goku, who stares back with an exaggerated poker face. He was always terrible at poker.

Yun dumps her cigarette and stretches, making the muscles in her arms even more obvious.

“Well, I’m heading in and saying you’re here, so you’d better get ready to work,” she says, not unkindly.

“Yeah, of course,” Goku replies, grinning at her.

Yun gives him another look and shakes her head, muttering something as he steps inside the bakery.

“What exactly did you tell her?” Sanzo asks dryly, and for some reason Goku flushes.

“I, uh… not much!” he says too quickly. “Nothing about, you know, the journey just… that I had a friend who was a monk and uhm—”

It’s odd, seeing Goku flustered like that, enough to stumble over his words. Odd and unpleasant.

“It doesn’t matter, so long as she doesn’t know anything she shouldn’t,” he interrupts, perhaps too sharply, but Goku only shakes his head.

“Ok,” he says softly. “I didn’t talk about that. I wouldn’t.”

The last one is almost hurt, almost melancholy, and Sanzo has to turn away.

He’s too easily affected, he thinks. Being away should have made this easier, not harder.

No, it never worked like that, did it? Just like drink didn’t get less potent by avoiding it.

Sanzo doesn’t apologise. He hadn’t accused Goku of anything, he’d done that himself.

“I’d better head back,” he says instead. He has to talk to Hakkai, no matter how unpleasant it is.

“Sure?” Goku says, something sad still lingering in his smile.

“I am,” he replies.

“I’ll see you after work then,” Goku says, and it’s a statement now, no question in it.

“Yes,” Sanzo agrees.

He has already turned away when Goku says.

“Wait! You know how I knew you were coming back?” he asks, not waiting for an answer before adding, speaking so fast the words almost blend together. “If you had really meant to leave, you would have said a proper goodbye, and you didn’t,” Goku states, simple words saturated by such certainty that it jolts something in Sanzo.

Fool, he thinks.

He considers it on the walk back, all of it. Considers it still at the café, sat at a corner table under Hakkai’s watchful eye.

Part of him still feels ensnared, like a man drowning tangled up in seaweed. But that hadn’t been why he’d left, had it? It had been because he’d felt adrift, devoid of the purpose that had carried him for so long.

So long as he had the mission, they couldn’t pull him down too far? He had set that goal above any person… but had that ever been true either?

He’d decided to survive at any cost, with or without them. Never become the sacrifice, carry the burden of life to the bitter end if he had to. And he had. That they’d been returned to him afterwards through some miracle had seemed false. Things like that didn’t happen, not in his life.

Was that the true reason he’d left after all, to escape the realization that there was nothing to pull him free from those ties now, so he’d tried to break them with distance instead?

A gentle cough pulls him out of contemplation, and he looks up at Hakkai.

“I’m having lunch, I thought you might want to join me?” he says, “the lunch rush will be later, so it’s best to do it now, with no one else here today,” he adds, in a faintly long-suffering tone, as if it hasn’t been a quiet day.

Sanzo isn’t hungry, but he figures this is Hakkai wanting to take him aside for the discussion, the one he’s been preparing for all morning.

“Sure,” he says. It sits ill with him, being on the defence, but it is likewise bothersome being on bad terms with Hakkai. So, he supposes he’ll try to be civil.

Hakkai, in his considerate fashion, waits until they both have eaten their lunch before he speaks. Sanzo mostly finds it heightens the tension, which might or might not be intentional on Hakkai’s part.

“I may have been too harsh, last night,” Hakkai says, quiet but not exactly apologetic.

Sanzo considers possible replies to that and discards them. Hakkai’s staring at him expectantly.

“I don’t know what you want from me, exactly?” Sanzo asks, irate, and only more so as Hakkai sighs, superciliously.

He leans over the table, even his real eye like green glass, and says, in a faintly condescending tone: “I know it’s difficult for you to process emotions, but—”

Sanzo finds he has sprung up and slammed his hand into the table hard enough to rattle the bones of his arm.

“You hypocritical ass!” he hisses. “Process emotion?  At least I never went on a murder spree because some shitty villagers valued their life over one person’s fate!”.

Hakkai smiles, sharp as knives.

“No, you only decided never to care about anyone ever… who did you lose to come to that conclusion, Sanzo?”

It, oddly, doesn’t hurt as much as it should, and the realization douses the flames of his anger, leaving only exhaustion. He closes his eyes. Has it really been that long?

“Sanzo?” Hakkai says, from somewhere far away. His voice has gone small and abashed. “That was… going too far, I’m sorry.”

Sanzo opens his eyes, realizes he’s still standing up next to the table, in Hakkai’s stupidly homey orange and green kitchen. He sits down and scowls down at his teacup, probably cold by now.

“You died too, you’ve no right to talk,” he says, his voice rusty. He’s surprised himself to hear it come out, and how he almost sounds petulant.

“Oh,” Hakkai says, his eyes widening. He smoothes a hand over the grain of the table and clears his throat. “We did, I suppose. But why…”

“You really want to know why I fucking left?” Sanzo snaps, fed up with the discussion. “I couldn’t go back to Xi’an and be treated like someone I wasn’t, I couldn’t…” he bites off the words welling out of his throat, as humiliating as if they were bile.

He couldn’t stand to look at the three of them back then, even when walking away had felt like cutting off a limb, because he’d already felt like that anyway. He hadn’t even known who he was, without the sutra over his shoulder, without the mission of getting back the one that should have been there all along.

He still didn’t really know why Koumyou had died, and most probably never would. Maybe Ukoku had had something to do with it, or maybe he’d just taken the opportunity… the youkai who’d done it were probably long dead either way.

Hakkai of all people has no fucking right to lecture him, and Sanzo wants to tell him that, but even that feels like too much of an admission.

“Oh.” Hakkai says, still sitting at the table with his eyes wide and faintly shocked. Then, almost sheepishly, he says: “I’m sorry. I guess I really didn’t understand.”

“Tch,” is all Sanzo can manage, but the silence between them now is at least more embarrassing than oppressive.

Hakkai sighs, leans his head onto his hand and chuckles weakly.

“It’s only I worried for Goku. He was so restless, for a while.”

“Goku? When has he not been?” Sanzo asks dubiously, and Hakkai shakes his head with a slight smile.

“You weren’t here,” he says, and he doesn’t even mean it as a dig, Sanzo can tell. “He was irritable, distant. And then he found his own apartment and this job as a fireman, and it’s so dangerous... Gojyo tells me I worry too much,” he says with a hollow laugh.

Sanzo thinks so too, but doesn’t say it, if only to avoid publicly agreeing with Gojyo.

“He’s an adult,” he says instead, and then considers. “Is it really that dangerous, what he does?”

“Not compared to his past job, perhaps,” Hakkai says with a small dark chuckle, then shakes his head. 

“Well, either way he seems more settled now, but if you leave again, who knows.”

Ah, it makes sense Hakkai would worry about that, Sanzo realizes in a flash of insight. He, who builds his life around a single person like a clinging vine, utterly lost without them. That will never be Goku, Sanzo knows with a certainty. He doesn’t say it aloud, because it doesn’t really matter if Hakkai knows. Let him figure it out or not.

“You all bug me about that!” he says instead, and thinks, fleetingly, that Goku hadn’t, before banishing the thought. “The hell do you think I’m going? There is such a demand for priests with few particular skills, isn’t there?”

Hakkai laughs, his voice relieved.

“You did use to run a large monastery.” He points out, and Sanzo scoffs.

“Yes, and it was a pain in the ass! I never want to hear another idiot complain about some issue they could have solved themselves with minimal effort.”

“Hm, I suppose so…” Hakkai demurs. “Well, I wouldn’t mind help with the paperwork, it tends to pile up during the busier times,” he says, lightly, glancing around the kitchen as if checking to see whether anything needs fixing.

“Hn,” Sanzo says, taking a drink of his tea and making a face at the cold bitter liquid.

“Oh, do you want more tea?” Hakkai asks, and it’s odd how they are back to normal again, or some approximation of it, just like that.

Once again, it startles Sanzo, although none of this is new, really. How much familiarity there is between them, all of them, the sticky, addictive closeness that is as hard to quit as the cigarettes would be. An anchor as much as a ball and chain, tying him down either way.

But it had been there when he was apart, just as much as it was when he was with them. Breath it in and breath it out. There was no escape from attachment, no escape from his heavy load of karma, the good and bad, whatever, in the end both were baggage.

He didn’t want to go to heaven anyway and get leered at by the Merciful Goddess. He’d done enough for those bastards in this life as it was.

*

As it turned out, other people in Chengdu besides Hakkai could use help with their paperwork. With the scholarly types that frequented the café he’d even gotten a few translation jobs. They seldom paid well but were a bit more stimulating that calculating finances and writing down receipts.

He’d figured out rather soon after arriving in Chengdu the most likely reason why Goku didn’t live with Hakkai and Gojyo. If it did have anything to do with any inner turmoil he may or may not have felt, Sanzo couldn’t say. What he did know (oh, did he ever know) was that the walls were thin and Hakkai and Gojyo were horny, noisy idiots with no consideration for other people.

Luckily, as it turned out, the house Goku lived in had a vacant room. The landlady was called Liu Bai, a kindly and mostly deaf older woman. It had been rather odd to have the monkey vouch on his behalf, but not much more so than the rest of it.

The landlady was one of the Liu clan, just like the baker and his daughter Yun, and as far as Sanzo could tell they had practically adopted Goku. He hadn’t quite realized what moving into the house got him into, until a couple of weeks in when he got a firm invite to the first family dinner, the countless Lius of varying ages crowding around the big table downstairs. The only people he recognized were the landlady Liu Bai, the baker Liu Chun and his daughter Yun, (a notorious former delinquent, Sanzo had gathered) and of course Goku.

“I heard you used to live in Chang’an before?” a middle-aged woman asks him, her voice breathless with wonder. “I’ve always wanted to go there! I hear the temples are beautiful. And the cotton cloth from there takes dye so well too!”

Sanzo looks around for Goku, hoping for a way out of the conversation, but finds him covered in a dozen young children crawling all over him and telling him about their week all at once.  

He is unexpectedly saved by Yun, who leans over the table towards the woman and drawls.

“But aunty, don’t you always say the traders from Chang’an are a bunch of cheating conmen?”

“Oh, this has nothing to do with that!” the older woman protests, her cheeks flushing. “I mean, the cloth, for the most part, is very good, but they’ll—” and she is off on an impassionate tangent about the various ways to cheat cloth buyers out of their money, which gives Sanzo an opportunity to inch away.

Later, when he goes out for a much-needed smoke, he finds Yun there already, smoking one of her clove cigarettes. She glances his way, yellowed blunt fingertips flicking away the excess ash with surprising grace. 

He nods a greeting and settles at her side. Goku seems to trust the woman, and she has never bothered him, which puts her in Sanzo’s good books so far.

“Goku doesn’t talk about his past,” she says after a while, easily. “That’s fine by me, it’s what people do in the present that really matters, right? Besides, I know he’s a good guy. So I’m not gonna ask.”

She falls quiet again, and Sanzo doesn’t volunteer any information.

“He’s very loyal too,” she adds after a while. “Whoever he chooses as his partner is very lucky.”

He doesn’t choke on the cigarette smoke he’s been drawing in, but he knows his shoulders tense just perceptively. From a few conversations around the table that evening, he’d gotten the impression that some of the Lius hoped that Goku and Yun’s friendship might lead to marriage. Since he hadn’t seen any signs of that from their interactions, he’d assumed it was only baseless rumour but…

Yun laughs.

“Oh, don’t worry, he’s not interested in me!”

“I don’t think I asked,” Sanzo says sharply, starting to re-evaluate his impression of Yun.

She shrugs, not showing any sign of remorse.

“When one sees a friend suffering, it’s only natural to want to help, isn’t it?” she says and laughs, lowly and under her breath.

He was wrong, she is definitely evil after all, Sanzo decides.

Lying in bed that night, uncomfortably full of food and unable to fall asleep, he finds her words haunting him. As far as he can tell, Goku isn’t exactly unhappy, no more than he has ever been.

A soft knock on the door interrupts his thoughts.

“What?” he asks, sitting up in bed, and the door opens, admitting faint moonlight from the hallway outside.

When Goku peers in through the door, the light leaves odd shadows over his face.

“I couldn’t sleep, and I wondered if you were up too?” he says.

“Well, I am now,” Sanzo retorts, turning to click open the lamp on the bedside table. By the way Goku grins at him he knows they both know he doesn’t mean it.

“I’ve some sake if you want it?” Goku asks, brandishing a bottle and two glasses.

“It’s that sweet shit of yours, isn’t it,” Sanzo complains. “Whatever, I’ll take it. Don’t spill it or you’re sleeping here tonight,” he says without thinking. It only occurs to him afterwards how that could have been taken, by someone who doesn’t know he doesn’t flirt and never has. Good thing it’s only Goku, he thinks and refuses to be embarrassed.

Luckily, Goku just walks in and settles himself on the bed without any sign of having considered the words, pouring out the first drink and handing it over to Sanzo before pouring out his own.

“So, that’s the Liu family dinner,” he says after the first sip.

“A repeating event, I presume,” Sanzo replies flatly, and Goku sniggers.

“Only every second month or so,” he says. “They rotate among the people with a big enough room. But otherwise, yes.”

“Hmph. I see you didn’t warn me when I accepted the room,” Sanzo says, in the same dry tone as before. Ultimately, he can live with one evening like that every two months, considering Liu Bai otherwise leaves her tenants to live in peace. Well, apart from her cooking too much by “accident” suspiciously often, apparently mainly since Sanzo moved in. She’s a decent cook so he can live with that as well.

They drink a few more cups, talking about everyday things. Sanzo was working for a merchant house with rather disorganised books the previous week, Goku had to carry a cat _and_ said cats owner down from a tree three months ago. It is pleasant and easy, almost too much so.

Goku leans forward, his eyes gleaming in the soft yellow lamplight, gold all the way. He looks warm, the way he always has, from the smile to the gold eyes and skin that easily turns a warm brown in the sun. Not like Sanzo who only burns pink, who has never been a warm and open person, even before he’d gotten a good idea for just how cruel the world could be. All that considered, it’s funny that Goku had once, when he was much younger, explained very seriously how he was just like the sun.

Well, the sun is, Sanzo supposed, not necessarily very pleasant or helpful in many situations. Important but distant, apart.

He gazes down at his cup and wonders if he’s had too many. He doesn’t drink as much as he once did these days.

“You’re not unhappy, are you?” he asks, and yes, definitely too much sake.

Goku’s eyes widen in surprise.

“Huh, no. Why would I be?” he asks.

“Dunno. Yun said it,” Sanzo tells him, thinking it serves her right for giving away Goku’s secrets.

Goku makes a face and falls down on the bed, his hands spread to the sides. His knees have callouses on them, Sanzo notices absently.

“Nooo, that’s rubbish,” Goku complains, one foot pushing into Sanzo’s shin where he’s sitting cross-legged on the bed.

“I knew that,” he says with satisfaction.

Goku sits up like a jack in a box, and then goes slightly cross-eyed.

“Woah, room’s spinning,” he says.

“That’s because you’re drunk, dumbass,” Sanzo tells him, affectionately.

Goku blinks at him and smiles dopily, leaning forward. Or swaying, perhaps.

“Uhuh,” he mutters, and just when did he get that close? When did he himself lean forward?

The haze of the alcohol, along with the light from the chintzy lamp provided by Liu Bai gives everything a soft glow, and it’s so easy to bridge the gap between them, a quiet surprised noise escaping Goku’s lips as theirs meet, tentative. Sanzo finds himself unbalanced, and grabs onto the front of Goku’s shirt, balling the material in his fists.

Goku makes another sound and leans closer for another kiss, a deeper one. His hand settles on Sanzo’s thigh, a firm pressure that holds it down to the mattress. They are locked together, for a moment, with no thought for anything but the present.

And then Goku blinks, leans back with his mouth slightly open and lips a dark pink.

“Sanzo?” he says, an unvoiced question in the name, and the world crashes back in like a returning wave.

Sanzo sits back. His lips are still tingling faintly.

“That was a mistake,” he says, his voice flat.

Goku’s mouth twists and he turns away, something bright going dark in his eyes.

“Oh. Ok.” he says.

*

Sanzo finishes the last page of the work and lays it on the pile with relish. He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose, before leaning back in his seat and stretching.  The room around him is half office and half storeroom, smelling of rice dust.

There’s an almost soundless meow and something brushes against Sanzo’s calf under the table. It’s the ancient cat that has been sleeping next to his legs for the past hour at the least.  Absently, he leans down to pet it briefly, before getting up, his body protesting after sitting in the chair for so long. This is the third day he’s come to the offices of Chen Shi, importer of rice, who wanted to go through his books properly in preparation of handing the business over to his son.

The son, like Chen Shi himself, is a man with a sober disposition. He is also married to a former Liu, which was how Sanzo got the job, he thinks with a sigh. It’s how he gets most of his work, if he is entirely honest. He can only hope when the Liu family realize Goku will never marry Yun they won’t carry a grudge.

The thought of Goku sours the pleasant mood created by finished work.

The drunken kiss has hovered between them the last few days, like an awkward ghost they are both trying to ignore is there.

Sanzo is starting to feel guilty about it, and he doesn’t like the feeling.

They are to meet later, since the place Goku trains at is close by to Chen Shi’s office. It’s a training yard belonging to a martial arts school. The youngest son of the master is part of the fire brigade, Sanzo has gathered. After he has said his goodbyes and agreed about a payment for his services with Chen, Sanzo makes his way over.

It’s getting late, by then, the heat of the day starting to cool as the sun approaches the horizon, but warmth is still hanging above the dusty streets.

The training yard is a wide-open space of beaten sand surrounded by a walkway with a tiled roof and simple carved pillars. There are a few young men training there when he arrives, and a few others already cooling down at the sides in the shade of the walkway, sitting down and talking. Goku’s training with a tall man that Sanzo vaguely recognizes as one of the other firemen. Impressively, he seems to be holding his ground against Goku, who is grinning widely. They are both sweating and smudged with dirt, but hardly seem to notice it.

“Jīn Chánzǐ, isn’t it? I didn’t expect to see you here!” a voice calls to him, and Sanzo turns to see a man approach him. The scholar Chao Da, whom Hakkai seems to dislike for some reason, Sanzo recalls after a moment. He has had little interaction with the man, though he’s run into him at the café now and again.

The man smiles, and Sanzo doesn’t like the look of it. It is the smile of a person who wants something from him, too open and greedy. He glances at the men still training, and then back at Sanzo, with conspiratory amusement.

“They seem to be enjoying themselves, Mr. Son and the youngest Ming…” he mutters, his lashes lowering in a way that causes an alarm to begin to ring in Sanzo’s mind somewhere.

“I wouldn’t know,” he says, sharply.

Chao laughs, as if it were a joke, and says: “Perhaps not.”

Then, to Sanzo’s dismay, he steps closer, eyes wide with that same greedy curiosity of before.

“Perhaps I am stepping out of line,” he says, and adds before Sanzo can agree: “But I have been hearing the most incredible stories. About a certain expedition west, to stop the madness that affected the youkai… some say it was only four men, one of them a renowned Sanzo priests. I’ve heard nothing of the expedition ever returning, but it is remarkable how the attacks have more or less stopped since a year or so ago.”

Sanzo stands still, hoping his face shows nothing but boredom.

“Really?” he says. “I hadn’t heard. But then I was at the monastery until not so long ago.”

Chao’s eyes narrow and his mouth twists, but his voice is mild and even as he continues.

“To speak to someone involved in something that momentous… it would be invaluable to a scholar, I’m sure you understand?”

“Not really,” Sanzo replies, “I never was much of one.”

It’s by rote, but he feels very tired. He should have known there was no escape from this either.

“Do you know,” Chao adds, “I even heard a rumour that some of the companions, if not all of them even, were youkai! I wonder how people would feel if they knew that they were saved by the very things that threatened them.” He laughs. “Odd isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that sure is odd!” Goku says, his voice bright and cheerful.

By the way Chao blanches, he hadn’t noticed him approaching any more than Sanzo had.

Goku steps forward, and there is something about how his smile shows just a few too many teeth, and how his eyes almost glow yellow, that is clearly causing some unease to Chao, who takes a step back.

“I didn’t know you were interested in martial arts, Mr. Chao?” Goku asks. “I mean, I’ve seen you around before too… would you like to join in the training?”

Chao pulls back, seeming to recover some of his poise, barely.

“Ah, that’s… I’m merely appreciating the hard work you all do to keep us safe,” he claims, his voice too high and strained.

Goku frowns, the line of his mouth hard.

“I thought you were better than this,” he says, in a low voice. Guilt flashes across Chao’s face, making him seem momentarily like a spoiled child and not the grown man he should be.

“I just wanted to know the truth, that’s all,” he mutters.

Sanzo finds that he is laughing, a bitter sound. Chao looks surprised, Goku doesn’t.

“I couldn’t tell you shit about that,” he tells the disgusting little man. “All I’ve ever done is dirty work, most of it for selfish reasons.”

Goku opens his mouth, and Sanzo glares at him until he closes it again, rueful. He glares down his nose at Chao, and seeing the man shrink under his stare is very satisfying.

“Do you know how many people I’ve killed?” he asks, and Chao stares at whatever he sees in Sanzo’s face like a rabbit caught in the headlights. “Because I certainly don’t. If you even think about pressing me again, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life… and it won’t be long.”

By the end of his speech, Chao has gone as pale as milk and his mouth is hanging open.

“W-what?” he sputters and takes a step back on shaky feet. “Are you threatening me?”

Goku’s staring at Sanzo in dismay, paying little attention to Chao.

“Oh, you didn’t need to say that,” he complains. “He couldn’t do anything to hurt us anyway. People wouldn’t listen to him. Not anyone that mattered,” he says, with a carefree smile that cuts Sanzo somewhere he’d thought long since inured to pain. That he still has that much trust… but not now, not with Chao still there.

“I’m not talking to you,” he snaps instead. “You! Do you have any actual business here? If not, I suggest you go home to your poetry,” he tells Chao, who sends an imploring gaze Goku’s way, as if hoping for some reprieve.

Goku barely glances at him, his gaze fastened on Sanzo. He seems concerned, which is infuriating.

“Very—very well,” Chao manages to say, his voice shaking, before turning on his heel and walking away, just short of running.

“Sanzo…” Goku begins to say, only to be interrupted by a call of his name. Something about that gives Sanzo a niggling feeling of familiarity, as Goku turns from him, distracted.

Goku’s previous sparring partner bounds up to them like an oversized puppy, his face worried and eager.

“Was that man bothering you?” he asks.

Goku shakes his head and gives the man a grin that is, for him, unenthusiastic.

“No, we were just talking,” he says, so obviously lying Sanzo wants to smack him for even trying.

“I’ve seen him around before, if he’s causing any trouble, I’ll make sure he isn’t welcome around here,” the man says, puffing up his chest.

Goku laughs, more genuine this time, and punches the other man in the arm, hard enough that he rocks back on his heels.

“Oh, shut up, Ming Bo! You think I can’t take care of myself against anyone?”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t saying that, but if there’s anything I can do to help…” Ming Bo mutters, his eyes large and shining in a rough-hewn face.

He has barely noticed Sanzo, only having eyes for Goku.

Sanzo considers this, closing his eyes in weariness. Of course, he thinks. Just another of life’s little jokes on his behalf.

“I’m leaving,” he says, through grit teeth.

There’s the predictable plea that he wait, Goku very nearly slipping up and using Sanzo’s old name in front of Ming. He should have made the idiots use his new name all the time, not just in front of others, Sanzo thinks, despairing at them and himself. Should have stopped thinking it himself.

But he’s been Sanzo too long, perhaps, the name carved into the bones of his being. Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Whatever.

Goku catches up to him soon enough, just outside the wall of the training yard and at the mouth of an alley. There are no shops or pedestrians on the street, only houses with small gardens surrounding them. Somewhere a dog is barking, an irritatingly repetitive noise.

“I said wait, damn it!” Goku shouts, one hand closing around Sanzo’s wrist, just a bit too hard to be comfortable. He sounds angry now, and that is perfect, that is just what Sanzo has been waiting for.

He twists his arm away until Goku has to let go or really hurt him, and it is almost a disappointment when he does. Sanzo’s wrist throbs and his anger is blinding, simple.

“Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” Sanzo shouts back at him, and the dog barks louder, hysterical.

“What did I _do_? Why are you so angry?” Goku asks, sounding genuinely confused, his brows still furrowed, still trying to understand, and Sanzo finds he can’t bear it.

“You… you think I’m stupid?” Sanzo asks in reply, hearing his voice go cold and sarcastic. “You think if you say nothing, I can’t see you _pining_?”

Goku rocks forward, and Sanzo instinctively raises an arm to block the oncoming punch he can read in Goku’s movements, but he pulls back at the last moment, breathing hard, his eyes dark with pain. It twists at Sanzo’s insides, but he doesn’t look away.

“I… of course I know you see it! I never hid it! So what? I never said you had to answer it!”

Sanzo breathes in, becoming aware of his surroundings once again. The dog is still barking in the distance.

“You didn’t,” he admits, reluctantly.

Quiet settles over them once again.

“So why are you really angry?” Goku asks again.

Sanzo shrugs, finding he can’t meet his eyes again, the clarity in them too much.

“Is it because of Chao? What he said?”

“Fuck Chao,” Sanzo growls.

Goku laughs, sudden and surprised, and so hard he has to lean his hands on his knees and wipe tears from his eyes.

Sanzo raises an eyebrow at him.

“It’s hardly that funny,” he mutters, and Goku shakes his head, still laughing under his breath.

Eventually, he straightens up and makes a face, rubbing a hand roughly over his face.

“Haa, no,” he agrees. “I really doubt he will talk to anyone, anyway. He’s not a bad guy. He just has a one-track mind,” Goku says and shrugs philosophically.

“Did you tell him something?” Sanzo asks, suddenly suspicious.

Goku’s eyes flash and his mouth hardens.

“No, of course not! He put things together on his own. I didn’t even think he’d be interested in it, he only seemed to care about old poetry,” he says, frowning to himself by the end as if trying to work out what he did wrong.

And that’s odd, how Goku speaks of Chao almost like they were close once, when there is no feasible reason for it. If Chao is truly as much of a scholar as he seems, why would that have happened?

“How did he even get mixed up with you?” Sanzo asks, straight away.

“He, uh, I think he used to come to Hakkai’s café, to read books? And then he wanted to redecorate his house, so Gojyo got the job and I was helping him. We got to talking while I was working, is all.”

It sounds believable, except for the faint flush on Goku’s cheeks, just visible through his deep tan. Sanzo doesn’t want to believe the likely explanation for that, and yet, he has noticed the way Goku turns heads these days. He may not be tall, or pretty, but there’s a warm vibrancy to him.

“What did he do?” Sanzo asks, in a low voice.

Goku sighs gustily.

“Nothing!” he argues. “Well, uh. He said some things and we kissed, kinda.” He adds, poking at the ground with a point of his shoe. “But then Gojyo walked in on us and later I found out about his thing about you know what, so it didn’t really go anywhere…”

He shrugs, and he speaks lightly, if with some embarrassment. Sanzo can only reach one conclusion.

“You didn’t mind?” he asks with disbelief. Goku frowns.

“Should I have?” he asks, almost defensively. “I didn’t… I didn’t _dislike_ him. I mean, maybe I was a little curious,” he mutters towards the ground.

Sanzo tries to see his image of Chao from a neutral standpoint, and perhaps he isn’t entirely hideous. Still, he’s hardly a catch either.

“With him?” he asks again, dismayed, and Goku flushes an angry red.

“Yes, with him!” he mutters something barely audible about Chao having nice hands, and Sanzo sincerely hopes he only knows that by sight. Maybe it is unfair of him, but Chao, really, of all the people that clearly have an interest in Goku?

“What about Yun? Or that kid you were sparring with?” he asks, not sure why he keeps digging when he doesn’t really want to know.

Goku flails, his face still red.

“Yun’s a friend! And she said if she was going to date someone again it’d have to be serious, and I didn’t…”

“You didn’t want that?”

Goku goes quiet, almost seeming to shrink in on himself.

“Yes,” he says, “But not yet. I wasn’t sure I could, yet, with her.”

He swallows, then adds, almost rebelliously: “Because yeah, I wasn’t over you, if you have to know!”

Sanzo doesn’t know what to say to that. Goku sighs like a bellows emptying of air.

“I wasn’t going to say anything about it because I figured you knew, and you’ve never—” he hesitates a moment, then says: “I didn’t think you were interested in that stuff. Were you?” 

There's shaky determination there as he asks.

Has he, Sanzo wonders. It’s not something he has had much luxury or interest to consider. He’d been so young back in the distant days when he was only a novice, and almost everyone at the monastery hated him anyway. Shuuei hadn’t, but he’d been practically an old man in Kouryuu’s 13-year-old vision. It’s odd to think he’d probably been only a few years older, and the distance between them would have shrunk to nothing soon enough, if it had had a chance to.

But Koumyou had  died, and since then he’d had the mission to find the stolen sutra, and seldom any time to consider such trivial things as attraction. He’d decided he had little interest in it, and less time to bother with idiots led by their pathetic lusts.

When the Three Aspects had sent the four of them away to stop the minus wave, it had renewed that older mission to find the missing sutra, put on reluctant hold by the lack of anything even resembling a lead. And once again, he’d been fighting for his life nearly daily, and ground down by the effort of travel.

“I don’t know,” he says, hearing the distance in his own voice. “Not often.”

It’s not _never_ and they both know it.

Goku blinks.

“Really?” he asks.

Sanzo curses himself for opening this avenue of conversation.  

“Do we really have to talk about this?” he asks, irate, only more so because it feels like quitting.

“No. I guess not,” Goku replies, some flicker of hope in his eyes going out.

Sanzo looks at him, dismayed anew.

“Talk about it right now,” he adds reluctantly. “And don’t start expecting a full history.”

Goku laughs, sounding relieved.

“I won’t, I won’t!” he agrees, then swivels around with a start. “It’s this late already? And Hakkai’s making hot pot, if we don’t hurry Gojyo’s gonna snag all the good stuff!”

Sanzo snorts.

“Yeah whatever… oy, not so fast!” he calls after Goku, who slows down with an apologetic grin over his shoulder. They’ve exited the alley and are walking along wider street lit here and there by shop lanterns when he frowns.

“Wait, did you say Bo likes me too? He doesn’t… I don’t think.”

“Ha, you think so?” Sanzo says dryly, even as Goku is still frowning.

“Huh,” he says, and: “That’s a third person,” slightly puzzled.

Sanzo thinks but doesn’t say that three is hardly all of them, and the only reason more young Liu girls aren’t all over him is because they are afraid of Yun. Let Goku be oblivious, for now.

“Hakkai and Gojyo seem happy,” Goku says, seemingly out of nowhere, just as they pass the back wall of the small temple close to the café.

“Why are we talking about them?” Sanzo asks in reply, making a face at the unnecessary reminder. “The last thing I want to think about it just how happy they are…”

Goku sniggers.

“I tried to warn you,” he says smugly, and unfairly since Sanzo doesn’t recall any such thing. “They are so loud… I can’t believe none of the neighbours complain.”

It’s because someone tried and Hakkai scared them off, Sanzo would bet.

“Anyway, I was just thinking… uhm, never mind,” Goku finishes too quickly.

“What?” Sanzo asks suspiciously.

“Nothing,” Goku mumbles.

“Just spit it out.”

“Did you ever, with either of them?” Goku asks, his voice faintly choked, and Sanzo can’t see well enough on the mostly dark street, but he’d bet he’s blushing again. What even…

“No!” he protests. “Why the hell would I have?”

But he had looked, hadn’t he? Maybe precisely because he knew Gojyo was too busy playing a womanizer to take him up on it, and Hakkai was too torn between his dead sister and whatever he and Gojyo had at that point to notice… pathetic, the lot of them. He wishes he’d never found out Goku had noticed.

“That wasn’t anything,” he says, eyes closed against the swell of embarrassment and fingers rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Not anything serious.”

“Huh,” Goku says, contemplatively. “So neither of us has…”

“Don’t say it.” Sanzo warns him, alarmed, and Goku falls silent.

“Hey, Sanzo, wait.”

They are on another small alley by then, populated by fragrant cans of garbage. Something small skitters away into the shadows ahead of them, tiny pale legs flashing in the dark. Sanzo can just barely see Goku’s earnest face, but he can feel the hand on his arm just fine.

“The kiss, did you hate it?” Goku asks.

“I didn’t hate it,” Sanzo replies, the irritation in his voice mostly because he can’t deny it. “I was startled. And we were both drunk, it was a shit time for it.”

Goku laughs, softly, hesitates and then barges on.

“Would it be ok if we did it again? If not it’s fine, and I promise I won’t bother you…”

“Shut up,” Sanzo hisses, fed up, and leans down the scant inches between them to make sure of it with a kiss. It’s more awkward now without the glow of inebriation, with Goku in the middle of a sentence and their lips meeting oddly. It doesn’t feel like much of anything, but Goku makes a sudden noise, a hungry sort of gasp, and there is something intriguing there, something worth pursuing at a later date. Maybe.

They pull apart, some moments later, breathing too fast for two men standing perfectly still. Goku’s eyes are wide with wonder, and dawning with delight.

“You’re always going to be a bother one way or another, don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Sanzo tells him, hoping to keep him from saying anything horribly heartfelt.

Goku smiles, and clearly, he doesn’t need words to cause this unpleasant swooping sensation in the pit of Sanzo’s stomach. Damn him.

“Ok, I won’t then,” Goku says, smile turning mischievous, and when they turn to walk away from the stinking alley, he slips his hand in Sanzo’s, a press of fingers that lasts until they exit to the street the café is on. He thinks he can still feel it, after Goku has already let go.

Sanzo glances at him, on this street that is busy with late night pedestrians and lanterns from restaurants and bars open late. Sanzo thinks of attachment, thinks of being tied down and drowning in it. Thinks of how he has stopped fighting, has given in to a hold he knows he could break if he tried hard enough.

He doesn’t regret it, he realizes quite suddenly. Rather, he feels lighter than he has in years, perhaps ever. Light, without the weight of the sutra on his shoulders, a name that isn’t a title anymore, but secure with the lingering feeling of rough fingertips against his own, callouses catching together.

There are others who might be better for Goku. Kinder, easier… but, he thinks glancing at Goku’s profile drawn against the lamplight behind him, he doesn’t need to tell him that. Goku’s too stubborn to care about any of that.

Goku turns to him, and he looks hopeful, lips curling upwards. They’re at the café now, lights still on inside and visible through the windows, even though the sign at the door says it’s closed. He can hear familiar voices through the wall, Hakkai’s voice raised in half-hearted admonishment, Gojyo’s low and teasing.

Goku tilts his head, listening, and makes a face.

“Let’s go in,” he says, “before Gojyo really does eat the best bits.”

He opens the door and calls in a greeting, giving Sanzo a questioning look as he lingers.

“You ok?” Goku asks, in a quiet voice that won’t carry beyond the two of them.

Sanzo shakes his head, trying to clear it from the sensation of sudden, overwhelming content.

“It’s nothing, get out of my way,” he says, putting a hand on Goku’s back to push him in.

Goku’s mouth quirks and his eyes are fond.

“You’re the one dawdling in the doorway,” he says, sticking his tongue out, and Sanzo has to tsk and slap the back of his head with an open palm, which only makes him laugh.

They enter in an inelegant tumble, Hakkai leaning out of the doorway to the kitchen to call out a welcome, and to wonder what took them so long in his usual mother-hen fashion, Gojyo’s voice in the background throwing out a lewd suggestion that makes Goku stomp forward while shouting back at him.

Hakkai and Sanzo share a long-suffering look, both pretending they don’t love these two loud bastards and everything they are.

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, Sanzo thinks and steps forward.


End file.
